* Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013

Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Heresy!

Seriously - one of the most satisfying ways to cope with retarded units is to use them, invent even more, and crank it up to absurd levels.

Even if those Sun/DM/BBC/etc hacks won't pay attention, it's still a good deal of fun.

Apple kills its Stores

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"someone thought the word "store" was too downmarket."

Yep, far too mundane. Buying and selling goods? Bah. We're ascended beyond that. We're offering immaterial substances like lifestyle, experience, sense of belonging, a way forward.

Emporium is already used. Temple...no. Hallowed Halls of Apple...sounds good, but too long. What to do, what to do?

My headset is reading my mind and talking behind my back

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Fat-Burning Hats

"you burn a lot of energy regulating your temperature"

Blimey. Cold beer is a diet product. Cheers to that!

Tech support scammers mess with hacker's mother, so he retaliated with ransomware

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"Hello. Your computer has a virus."

"Um, no, but yours has."

Bleeping Computer countersues Enigma in software review libel row

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Bleeping Computer is a *bleeping* good friend of mine

"As I once said in a previous post, you should never use any software which has *spy* in the name."

Scratch Spybot S&D off that list. It's a honest product.

Bees bring down US stealth fighter

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Obviously...

Don't wax. There's at least beellion ways to have a sting at it, we're not even halfway through.

Adblock Plus blocks Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook block of Adblock Plus block of Facebook ads

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: I'm grabbing some popcorn

Was that an advert?

£1m military drone crashed in Wales after crew disabled anti-crash systems – report

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "Crew"

As the article explained in length: leaving crash protection on would have resulted in drone doing another fly-around. Probably in endless loop, until growing winds shred it apart or fuel runs out.

And then, after overriding the fly-around protocol, another automagical feature kicked in and pressed the nose down. Right into the tarmac.

So in this situation, about the only way to salvage the drone would have been to disable all "idiot-proofing controls" and land with manual controls. Which it didn't have.

Power cut crashes Delta's worldwide flight update systems

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

DC has cans of worms too. Higher currents for one. And there's a likelihood of self-sustaining arcs between contacts. High-current DC contactors are a marvel of engineering.

The developer died 14 years ago, here's a print out of his source code

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Mr Robot

"whens the last time anyone consoled into a server using a laptop via a serial cable?"

Last month. Network interfaces were down, no graphics card in the server, no lights-out management. Serial port saved the day.

Didn't notice flashy GUI though, only a command prompt with 10pt font. Very un-Hollywood.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Portrayal of computer tech guys in films/tv.

"But when you're searching for something, it's always in the last place you look."

Boob's Law had a nice rebuttal by Bloch.

You'll find it in the first place you look, but not on the first attempt.

Samsung Electronics reportedly ponders buying Fiat parts

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Like Lucas?

Could have mentioned models there, or at least the timeframe you're talking about. Fiat has a long & dwindling history with suppliers.

For what it's worth, my old 124 definitely had Marelli ignition coil and high voltage commutator. Was quite reliable for its era - but that era was bloody 50 years ago and expectations for reliability were not particularly high.

My Microsoft Office 365 woes: Constant crashes, malware macros – and settings from Hell

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

default settings

"I have no idea what Microsoft's target audience with their default settings is, but I don't think "people" is part of it."

There is an old joke about that: to make MS product usable you should start by reversing all defaults you can find.

Microsoft blames dying Surface Pro 3 batteries on software bug

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

battery firmware?

If this problem is linked to one specific battery vendor, then it could be a misunderstanding between ACPI power management and battery firmware. Like this one:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/documents/ht003431

It is also possible that bugs lurk on the ACPI side of things. Time will tell.

Captain Piccard's planet-orbiting solar aircraft in warped drive drama

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: sunshine

Moonshine is also produced from converted sunshine.

/Is it Friday already? Grrr./

BlackBerry's licensing strategy looks smart – and a lot like Nokia's

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: how long befor BB become

El Reg used to call them "Lawsuits In Motion" a wee while back.

Although these days it's more conceivable that somebody else would snap up their portfolio and do some patent trolling as a service.®

No, the VCR is not about to die. It died years ago. Now it's VHS/DVD combo boxes' turn

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Stop making me feel old

"total shit for reliability as one would expect from helical scan"

Old Exabyte 8mm helical scan format (up to 5 GB) was OK in reliability terms. But yes, later Mammoth format drives were awful, quite on par with DDS-4. Might just as well have used /dev/null for a backup - much faster & about the same chance of recovery.

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Wondering about a couple of things

W520 should do nicely. I had W500 available for W10 trials, it installed without hitches. Although I'm not actively using W10 myself, just tried it out of curiosity.

Go for spare HDD & ISO install, it's much neater that way.

W7 license should stay intact - SLIC keys are burned into the motherboard UEFI flash and AFAIK not changeable by Windows.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: DR-DOS and secret APIs

"So all those who claim to have not been able to run Win 3.x with DR DOS were running the beta."

Not necessarily. It is quite likely that a good number of problems got attributed to DR-DOS or AARD which were actually caused by other issues - finicky hardware, disk caching quirks, memory management quirks, etc. If reinstall with MS-DOS makes the problem go away, then it's easy to reach the conclusion that MS-DOS works better with Windows - even if it was down to something else.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: DR-DOS and secret APIs

"I never had any issues running Win 3.x with DR DOS 3.x."

As per Dr.Dobbs Journal - AARD code was disabled in release versions.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD

Microsoft ordered to fix 'excessively intrusive, insecure' Windows 10

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Constitutional Right

Ah, so that's the thing about Windows 10. All it has ever wanted is to speak freely.

Now I even feel bad about silencing one. Poor thing.

Well, in my defence, I thought of it in different terms - taking it for a new tool that is not up to snuff - but apparently missing a point then.

Correction: There was no hangman's noose, claims Hyperloop countersuit ... it was a cowboy's lasso

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Fruitloop One

(no comment required)

An anniversary to remember: The world's only air-to-air nuke was fired on 19 July, 1957

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Who cares if the elephant is white or not, as long as it can carry the load.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: its hard to find anyone who has died from radiation, anywhere in the world.

"Molten salts are the logical way forward, in large part because they mean there's no radioactive water/steam to contend with when things go wrong."

Are there any designs where molten salts do not absorb radioactive materials?

AFAIK that's the main problem with them - it's bloody difficult to clean a molten salt during operation, because it's hot, radioactive, and corrosive as hell. Fluoride salts being especially nasty. And there is no good way around it, as moderating agent has to be purified from protactinium & other undesired actinides that are inhibiting the reaction process.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: its hard to find anyone who has died from radiation, anywhere in the world.

And 22 deaths on the K-19 submarine, directly attributable to radiation poisoning:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_K-19

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Yup, that's a good recollection.

"Parsons, the Enola Gay's weaponeer, was concerned about the possibility of an accidental detonation if the plane crashed in takeoff, so he decided not to load the four cordite powder bags into the gun breech until the aircraft was in flight."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"In WW!!, the arming pins weren't pulled until the bomb bay doors were opened. I have no idea about nukes."

Fat Man (Nagasaki) was a complicated beast, so it had to be armed before takeoff. Causing some, ahem, anxiety for the bomber crew.

Hiroshima bomb was activated midflight. No nice red buttons though. Weaponeer had to crawl into the bomb bay and attach explosives to the bomb.

Later designs have undoubtedly been improved a bit.

Samsung spills beans on mystery username, password emails to devs

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Behind you

And in one fell swoop was the line crossed, that fine line between realms of DevOps and DevOops.

If we can't find a working SCSI cable, the company will close tomorrow

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: SCO is *not* dead...

...just resting?

That SCO Linux started life as Caldera Linux. Before Caldera conceived this bright idea to rename itself to "The SCO Group" and start suing world+dog for things that they didn't own, especially for Unix bits written by the original SCO aka Santa Cruz Operations.

TSCOG is not SCO. Or should we use newSCO and oldSCO?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Start with the basics...

"Likewise I prefer active terminators to passive ones given a choice."

Considering that only SCSI-1 allowed passive termination, it wasn't a choice. Having a set of active terminators in the backpack was a must.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Pins in the cable?

"All of the various SCSI types I've worked with had the pins in the device or on the controller"

That's odd. HD-68 was easily the most prevalent connector type for internal cabling. From Fast/Wide (appeared 1995 or so) through Ultra320. How did you manage to miss it? OTOH it may be a good thing, as SCSI cabling has always been an unholy mess. Good protocol though.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Not IT, but a similar experience

It was definitely a real thing. Tin-plated SIMMs and sockets were the worst, gold-plated ones slightly better. Putting gold-plated SIMMs into tin-plated sockets (or vice versa) was not a good idea, it invoked two camps of angry gremlins - those of physics and those of electrochemistry.

Physical weakness was mostly down to the SIMM socket design, where socket contacts touched only one side of the SIMM. And two measly latches in the socket had to hold the SIMM in place with enough force to secure all 36 or 72 contacts.

DIMM design is much better because of symmetricity - socket contacts are applying force evenly from both sides of the DIMM. Also, JEDEC gave out an edict saying "thou shalt not skimp on gold when plating contacts". Or something like that.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Amazing

If they do know what they're doing, it must be a grand plan along the lines of Dürrenmatt's "Romulus the Great".

Shocker: Computer science graduate wins a top UK political job

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: What about his political views?

And now the most crucial question - Emacs or vi?

Microsoft wins landmark Irish data slurp warrant case against the US

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Probably not fashionable

Au contraire. Let's give credit where credit's due. Well done, MS.

Normal service should resume soon enough, as Windows 10 and cloudobile push won't disappear anytime soon.

Tesla whacks guardrail in Montana, driver blames autopilot

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Idiots!

"Warning: Do not taunt Traffic-aware cruise control!!"

And never feed it after the midnight.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Excuse du jour

Or a chap who knackered his BMW and claimed a technical fault.

See, ESP did not pull his car straight when he was trying to overtake several lorries. On a curved road that was covered with a soup-like mix of ice and wet snow. Will those bloody Germans ever learn to build cars?

You can’t sit there, my IoT desk tells me

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Well, if that Gaze contraption was foisted on me...

"I'd have to put a controller on my chair, to make it automatically follow the desk's height."

Yay, office rodeo!

/devil.jpg/

Lenovo scrambling to get a fix for BIOS vuln

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Back to the old laptop for me...

Well, he had a line there

"I wouldn't mind BIOS / UEFI being so large if it had a Unix-like environment that provided /.../ "

to which I replied that this is indeed the case with server UEFI implementations - they have a complex environment built in, but not quite Unix-like.

If anyone fancies to do an open source re-implementation, that'd be possible, there is lots of space to do it.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Back to the old laptop for me...

On x86 servers UEFI does most of those things you wished - it has filesystem support, TCP/IP support, ability to change any HW settings remotely, apply HW settings from a config template. Useful when rolling out a large batch of servers. So it's more like a small operating system - whether that's a good or a bad thing I cannot tell. UEFI shell isn't UNIX-like, though.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Not Again!!!

This issue has far wider spread - an embuggerance in the Intel reference code that is present in most UEFI implementations. I'd be mightily surprised if any of the PC vendors were able to spot it beforehand.

Even more worrying - if this one gets patched, are there other surprises lurking in Intel management functions like AMT? Some people have been distrusting UEFI & AMT for years. Probably for a good reason.

Isis crisis: Facebook makes Bristol lass an unperson

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Like-block

Dear Facebook. We have to inform you that our internet usage policy requires us to permanently block offensive webpages like faceboot.com and fecesbook.com. As your domain name is confusingly similar to these sites, and your site often carries improper content, we do not see a possibility to make a policy exception for you. Consider changing your name to something less offensive.

Jury awards US$3 BEEELION to HPE in Oracle/Itanium lawsuit

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Porting software ...

For a database engine it's a bit more complicated. Developers have to have a really good grasp of OS innards like memory and I/O management. After years of development on a specific OS you're usually looking at a codebase that is wildly different from others.

But yes, no disagreement about Oracle - dropping HP-UX was just a pure unadulterated nastiness.

/edit: Just what EveryTime says below. Good comment./

Pollster who called the EU referendum right: No late Leave swing after all

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: No polls when the moment is there IMO

Has been tried. Interferes with freedom of speech, but otherwise a good idea.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_silence

Blighty's EU science funding will remain unchanged until new PM triggers Article 50

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Moldovan and Romanian

Romanian language happens to be a descendant of Latin. Moldavian isn't officially recognized as a separate language.

But - by unverified claims about 20% of words are imported from Slavic neighbours, and Moldova has a sizeable percentage of people fluent in Russian. They'll probably understand what you're talking about.

Anyhow, dictionare.com does not show any Romanian words stemming from "gov" or "gav" roots. The word you're referring to is "rahat".

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ignition!

Might be this 2013 thread:

m.forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2013/04/02/race_for_space_1/

Peter Gabriel-backed music startup goes titsup, takes £500k of your money with it

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Once upon a time, Charlie Demerjian presented an interesting argument - that wasting money for perceivably good reasons is actually an important quality of the government.

"That in a nutshell is why we need governments who will occasionally waste money in our name. They play the odds that no rational person on their own would, and we all benefit as a group. If you throw that to the whims of the free market, for the same reason that they won't plan out more than a year, they won't do what it takes to protect you."

"Money is something that capitalism is really good at, and the free market is really good at optimising for it, but the government by and large sucks at this. They are pretty good at preserving life, sometimes above and beyond rational reasons to do so, something private enterprise is very bad at."

www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1037618/new-orleans-catastrophe-down-to-privatisation

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "Amusing typo. Deliberate or cock-up?"

Yeah, Papa Freud would be proud.