Posts by sean.fr 116 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Aug 2012
Is there anyone in IT how has not burned by a bad script story?
Anything one off has a high change of bugging.
So I test scripts on a small subset first -possible as small as one vm/switch/customer.
Then a bigger subset..
This does not look like that time my script got a "," when I was expecting a "." because I did allow for a mix of country setting.
This looks like no testing at all.
Most users are on home routers or cell phones . Cell phones just use what the phone companies supplies. The user has no interest in how it works. Small business and home users are satisified with IPv4. If you can not get adoption after all this time, you need to address why people do not want to move. IPv6 is just too complicated for the typical use case. You may need it for the Internet of Trash. But I do NOT want my light bulbs on the same network as PC and printer. The home NATing router is great protection. I do not care if the uplink is IPv6. But in my house - IPv4 is just easier.
You need the ABS/breaks to be isolated from the Stat Nav, They should not be on the same hypervisor. The lifetime of a car is long. Do want to bet your life that no bug /hack is found between now and 2035? Even if over air patches are a thing are you sure there will not be another hyervisor jacking problem like CVE-2015-3456.
I would prefer the radio was just a radio/music centre in a standard slot, and I can relace it with an after market device. I would prefer GPS ran on my phone, so I can pick the plan and upgrade. Just because you can put it all on one chip, that does not make it a good idea. The hardware saving is trival, and the locking to the manufacture worrying.
You need the ABS/breaks to be isolated from the Stat Nav, They should not be on the same hypervisor. The lifetime of a car is long. Do want to bet your life that no bug /hack is found between now and 2035? Even if over air patches are a thing are you sure there will not be another hyervisor jacking problem like CVE-2015-3456.
I would prefer the radio was just a radio/music centre in a standard slot, and I can replace it with an after market device. I would prefer GPS ran on my phone, so I can pick the plan and upgrade. Just because you can put it all on one chip, that does not make it a good idea. The hardware saving is trival, and the locking to the manufacture worrying.
I thought the PI production company has or at least had charitable status which gave it a price advantage over the tax paying competition. Broadcom made a good decision gifting technical support. Lots of chip sales. There were / are other "better" ARM processors in the same price range.
Knew it was dodgy when they did the True VNC product placement.
Fortunately there are several PI like boards.
Like IBM and the PC, they may have greated the market, but it is unclear they can hold the market.
If they raise prices to maximise profits ...
Ubuntu on Pi class ARM processor is now supported directly by Ubuntu. There is very little secret sauce to give them an IP edge.
Something is not being explained.
Can just 30 addresses really be a major problem? It should be real easy to block 30 addresses.
If not blocked by the local ISP, it can be blocked at the ISP outside Russia.
There are companies that sell real time reputation checking services - both as an ISP service and as a firewall feature.
It is easy to speak ill of Russia and China and forget the other players. There is no commitment from the USA, Israel, India and the EU to resist the temptation to hack their enemies.
Lead by example.
Hubble is less impressive when you remember it came after several decades of space telescopes,
There have been optical spy satillites since the 60s, - keyhole series -
They did not have the benefit of human intervention to fix the mirror.
It can be cheaper to launch one cheap telescope every few years rather than to over engineer one to make it last 30 years. That redundancy adds weight and complexity. Weight explodes the launch cost.We could engineer cars to last 30 years, but we actually engineer for 10 years. We want the benefits of newer technology.
Hubble was so expensive it required budgets from ESA and NASA. It is a legacy of all that is wrong with NASA. KISS - keep it simple - keep it cheap. The you can afford to fail.
These are porn films? There is so much free porn, why would you steal it?
Or is the "free" on well known sites also stolen?
Is it safe to watch because you watch online and do not download the whole thing. When you not actually watching, there is no copy on your hard disk to give to someone else.
If you want to buy music - hit singles - track by track - in an open format - so you can freely copy and move between devices, other than Amazon there are few options.
7digital is one. They do offer loses.
But as no-one has hear of 7digital, I guess it is not a big selling point.
A new retail Windows install pushes you to have the username and password processed by Microsoft.
The local account option still exists, but is well hidden. Microsoft can be compelled to recover to the USA, anything Uncle Sam wants, even if it violates local laws. As people hand over the keys to the castle to Microsoft during install, thats almost everything on every domestic PCs sold in the last couple of years.
The slur is that the French are lazy.
They are no worse than the USA or Germany.
Can we agree that if 35 person hours in France produces about as much as 40 person hours in the UK, that the French are doing something right? They are working to similar rules.
So the question comes down to can the French really produce in 35 hours about much as a Brit in 40.
Fortunately this is actually something the UK government has looked at.
International comparisons of UK productivity
(ICP), final estimates: 2016 page 3
[UK]
lower than that of Italy by 10.5%, with the gap widening from 9.6% in 2015
lower than that of the US by 22.6%, with the gap narrowing from 23.1% in 2015
lower than that of France by 22.8%, with the gap widening from 22.2% in 2015
lower than that of Germany by 26.2%, with the gap narrowing from 26.8% in 2015
If the authors are American - productivity per hour about the same as at home. A lot better than Canada and the UK.
Halon is gone - production stopped - Use banned with a few exceptions. There are other gases eg Novec 1230. but you can not just change the gas. You need to replace the installation as the new gasses take more space.
The space/weight issue is why there are exceptions in transport.
According to factcheck.org , Hunter Biden has a 10% stake in “BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Company (‘BHR’).
He will almost certainly make millions on Chinese investments through charges - according to factcheck.org.That millions, not Billion as stated by Trump. I expect this dispute will disappear if Daddy wins.
Linux desktop fans need a clear Linux desktop winner. Microsoft can pick that winner.
If one distro comes pre-installed in Windows, it becomes de facto the standard, and a serious competitor to Windows.
It is the "IBM compatible" effect. IBM unified the market and did themselves out of a job.To a large extent, it does not matter which distro one wins. By winning the race, there will be less duplication, and the winner will just get better.
That does not stop you and me running a different Linux in a Pi or a server or our home machine. It's open source, we can take back what we like.
The trick to not allow "a Google". They started with an open source product - Android - forked from Linux - hence open source. Then they in effect closed it by adding bits - like the store, Maps etc. I assume Microsoft will try the same. It is a risk, but at present Linux has close to zero of the desktop market.
The American system threatens life + 10 years so almost everyone is forced to accept a deal, guilty or innocent. He will do a deal and we will probably never have the full facts – unless it is a Chinese compamy. If I ran Netflix I would go after the suppliers in civil court.
The principle of packages of content is bad. Just let me pick the content episode by episode, and let me purchase it from anywhere in the world. Like music.
Netflix do add value, because they do smart caching of popular content. If everyone is watching the new James Bond, it makes sense to avoid a point to point flow from MGM to each home.
Lets get back to the original Netflix rent a DVD model. Item by Item. No box. No recurring charges.
A clear separation of the deliver system from the product beling delivered.
While not my first langage, it was the first that did not involve paper tape or cards and a long wait for batch processing .Dartmouth Basic on a terminal. A whole generation of British people learnt BASIC on BBC micro in school. I have fond memories of Basic on a Z81, Tiny Basic in 4K on the processor chip, BBC Basic and Basic in Excel. I loved Visual Basic and the BASIC family in general.
I have see examples python scripts in Linux to do maintenance. Eg something called in a crontab to say rotate logs etc, or to backup a network device.. But I see more examples of perl glue, and perl is auto install in the distro.
I can not see what python3 does that perl does not do. I cannot not see what python3 does that python2 does not do. I can see it is popular. But can someone explain why it is popular?. What was added over time that made a break necessary, What are its direct competitors?
Note, I am not asking if it is any good - clearly some people think it is. There are much more books about it than say Visual Basic.I am trying to understand the design choices only. It seems to have features or lack features that you could expect in a modern language.
GUI support seems light. Arrays are not a native data type. Parameters passing to functions seem be not exactly by value nor by reference. What are features that attract users?
Thats a bit strong.
To quote John Richards, the founder of The Apostrophe Protection Society:
"We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won! "
If people are doing it "wrong", in large numbers, wrong becomes acceptable. Few of us are confident in the Apostrophe rules, or particularly care.
This is no Académie Française for English. In school there may be a school exam board. But this is not school, it is an informal context.
If you want a spell/grammer button added to the posting screen, I am Ok with that.
I would expect the courts to make available all bank records as part of the settlement process. So there is a possible "due process breach" but not a privacy breach. It is material to the breakup settlement. It may be community property. It may show funds being hidden. It may show infidelity. Who is at fault is still a factor in many countries and in many US states. Plus if no change was made, how would you know?
I have asked woman at work several times over several years. About half say in normal times, they look at partners spending, call history, emails, and in their partner wallets. They say they would be negligent if they did not. It is part of the role of a wife, is to keep her man/partner honest. There is no clear common expectation of privacy to protect a partner from a wife. Or at least the wifes do not conceding it. Paradoxically, none of my male co-workers would come out and publicly say they spy on their wife in the same way. Pretty much everyone that thought would seem much more creepy.
This asymmetry is NOT PC, it is just how it is.
It is not simple for the law to untangle the mess inside couples and families. In practice the law may not even be able to keep you physically safe.
The question of hacking or not hacking probably depends on technical details like the banks T&C, and possible the state of the common home.
I like thunderbird. It is the second thing I put on a new machine - after anti-virus. There was a handy tool to migrate accounts from an old machines to a new machines -Mozbackup. Mozbackup does not work now. It took a snapshot of all the emails + account details on the old machine, then a simple import. Easy. No need to find the email account details. Also a good backup in case the hardware crashes. Christsmas, we bought a faster PC and I had to do this manually - painful.
If you moved ISP years ago, but are still using the email account on the old ISP - you may have big problems if you cannot find the account password.
Without Mozbackup - next PC change, I will probably abandon Thunderbird.
Multicasting is good for "broadcasting like services" to lots of watchers, eg London traffic cams and Empire State. The multicast enabled routers duplicate on demand. Which makes a bandwidth billing issue. But there are better ways to do this now. A single PC NIC is Gigabit and can feed 1000 whatchers. Netflix, Youtube look at traffic flows and put servers where they need to in your IPS racks. They cache near to customer what they can. They duplicate flows where they need to.
Multicast is still good for CCTV but off the internet.
The internet of trash. Has internet connectivity, and security is not a selling point, Unlikely your heating or front door camera is going to stay patched and secure for long. It may be used against you or against other eg in DDos. Best to keep that off your private IPv4 subnet 192.168 or 172.16 or 10 networks.
Pretty much all home users do not need a unique IPv4 routable address. Inside your on 192 or 172 or 10 NATed addresses.
It is business that need IP4v addreses. So if ISP do some NAT magic, based on DNS, they can still sell into the home market. As they renew ISP home boxes to existing homes, they can recover addresses v4 addresses to their business users.
While you can block ping and there could be good reasons to do so. Typically on BGP4 routers belonging to Internet providers. Mostly it is the last thing you want do. You want ping, traceroute and DNS working just to be sure your public facing services are up. Theregister.co.uk is pingable. But most addresses are not servers. They are ISP home routers with NAT.
How do you expect your ISP to provide support if you block ping?
So if 70% of addresses are not pingable, it is fair to guess 69% are not directly routable and could be reallocated.
I remember CIDR (subnet masks beening introduced). The change did not require much relearning.
With proxy arp, the change was pretty painless.
If you ping scan the internet, much of the addresses are actually not responding,
There is massive scope to recover addresses. But this is hard work for the people holding addresses.
If IP addresses were taxed or widely traded, there would be a reason to do this hard thing.
The trading of IP addresses is possible, but there is no clear approved way to do this.
I am not sure you got the point I was making. President Roosevelt blocked trade and froze assets in July 1941. Perl Harbor was the Japanese miltary response in December. That did not end well for Japan.
So China has made plans to survive any blockage without starting a shooting war with the USA. They have built islands to defend trade routes. They bought into European ports. They have invested in overland routes. They even run regular trains to the UK.
If I buy a PC, here in Europe it is probably "manufactured" in Ireland.The expensive parts are mostly manufactured in Chine by Foxcom. But the bits are assembled in Ireland for Dell /HP and so it gets a CE mark. Ireland is not putting a Trump tax on the Intel chip manufactured in China.
If my Cisco switch assembled in India has silicone from a Chineses fab plant, it still can have that backdoor. It only makes security sense if the silicone is fabed in the USA. It only makes economic sense if the Trump tax is exported to any country selling into the USA.
China saw the impact of the USA blockage of the Japanese colonial empire - and the resulting shooting war starting with Perl Harbor. The US Military is bigger now. Bigger than USSR, China, UK , France and German militaries combined. They can not do a Perl Harbor to break a blockade.
The whole Belt and Road project is China setting up to deal with this kind of treat from the USA.
It is not a Western democracy China does not need to keep the electors sweet.
This is maybe their chance to push the USA out of the way. Much as the USA pushed the British empire out of the way.
Money to get launch costs down makes some sense. But launching stuff you do not need is not the way to go. If at some point you get 22 tons of raw material into a low space orbit for just the 200k dollars fuel cost, you now need the tech to carry your product back to earth. It may be down hill but if it is at all bulky, heavy or delicate like 200Km of premium fibre at 1 dollar the metre, problem. We can not do it yet.
It could be one or two human hearts - at 250k dollars each. A better investment would be to spend the money on a new and cheaper source of insulin for under insured Americans tax payer, rather than spending on health care for the super rich.
The health downsides of putting people into a zero G factory to work on the heart production line is far greater than health benefits of the products. Would anyone approve a factory were workers have serious health issue after 12 months. Like not being able to walk for a day or two. Your bones and muscles weaken, and you may get permanent eyesight changes. Plus a significant risk of your transport to work exploding.
If this stuff make any commercial sense, you do'nt need the tax dollars. You need venture capitalists.
The limit to the length between fibre joins is the mechanicals. How big a roll of cable can you get on a truck and pull in. Typically around 4km. Bandwidth is improving by putting better active equipment on the existing fibre types. It is not normal for tax payers money to pay to improve the fibre and not fund the equipment on the fibre or fund more installation into the ground.
The major drugs issue are affordablity, and resistance. Space is just not important.
Assuming the processes can be perfected, it is unlikely that manufactering commercial quantities of anything in space of anything will be be thing in the next 100 years. Transport costs are out of this world.
If you just want micro gravity there are more than enough modules in place.
We know micro gravity is bad for your health, and we have known for some time. If you want long space flights, you need to fix that issue.
So next space station tech to try is spinning to get something like gravity. It is hard, as you need a large radius from the centre of rotation. Maybe 100 to 200 metres assuming a couple or revolutions per minute. But it does not have to be symmetrical. A long arm with countereweight may work.The connection from the gravity zone to centre of rotation would be under tension so that makes it a lot easier to find a light solution. Plus, we may find 0.5G is good enough. Maybe a few hours a day is enough - so does not need to be so big a space. But what we are actually - doing is same old same old. So we just do not know. For scale, the ISS is about 100m long now.
Telnet sends passwords in clear text over the wire.
Unless you change it, snmp have the default passwords public and private.
Assuming using the popular version v2c, rather than version3. passwords in clear.
HTTPS and SSH2 are better. Use HTTPS for the first box as it is easy. Then use SSH2 to copy the text config to the next box.
But to be fair, you are more likely to have downtime due to a hardware failure and human error than a hacker sniffing the wire.
The easiest hack is to just walk off with the equipment. So step one, is sort out physical access.
Standardized spelling is not critical to understanding or precision in communicating ideas. People were writing laws and contracts before dictionaries became popular around 1800, and then they only established a locally normalized spelling.
If you ask a friend under 40 to show you their phone messages, it will become clear than in an informal context, spell is not particularly important.
In my case, my PC localization is not english so it is just not spell checking.
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