* Posts by Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013

Facebook crushes Belgian attempt to ban tracking of non-users

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"it pisses me off to no end that I can't do anything about it."

Nor can anyone else, including courts. Because of jurisdictional issues. See, there was a point after all.

Correction: an individual can still do a thing or two, like refusing FB cookies or blocking FB at the firewall. But these options are not so easily available to legal entities, because they'd face legal challenges from both FB and its desperate users.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

re: jurisdiction

Welcome to the Brave New World. Where we (supposedly) have no local data, our local laws do not apply, and local courts can do diddly squat about it. Add TTIP to the mix and it gets really peculiar.

Today it's about Facebook, but same issues of trust are inherent for all cloudy services.

Fear and Brexit in Tech City: Digital 'elite' are having a nervous breakdown

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"Really its up to Boris to take the lead now."

Boris does not seem to agree. He just did his own BJexit.

This local council paid HOW MUCH for an SD card?!

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: why any computer even accepts sd cards

Because it's Secure, and Digital. Duh!

/troll.jpg/

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"If the council did indeed buy a swish SD card because that's what was required by the piece of kit being used with the card"

Quite plausible. Certified spare part from vendor X - maybe with a specific software image. Plenty of possibilities here. Context matters a lot.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Or a cheap part [accidentally] ordered via expensive courier.

I've seen such a case - $20 part arrived from China with a $240 shipment cost attached. Ouch.

We have hit peak Silicon Valley: New crazy goal to disrupt entire cities

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: To play Devil's Advocate

"While it's all very well to poo-poo the ideas being floated"

No, it would be a good idea to let the poo-poo float away.

Upvote for the rest though. That's how seed/angel investors usually work. They knowingly invest in lots of silly projects, because there is no good way to recognise a future talent without sifting through the whole lot. And that's lots of sifting. About 80-90% of the initial investments will definitely fail. From the rest, 80-90% can barely provide a return. All the hope is on the remaining percent or two - maybe there's a golden goose hidden somewhere.

It's all about early discovery of the young talent.

Quick note: Brexit consequences for IT

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Switzerland

No breaking into Belgian telecoms then?

That's one of the little pleasures Switzerland cannot afford.

UK digi strategy on ice post Brexit results - sources

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

obligatory MP quote

'Tis but a scratch!

Why you should Vote Remain: Bananas, bathwater and babies

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: The Euro currency can NEVER succeed

"You hold up the US as an example, but there is a single fiscal policy for the country, the states cannot set their own."

Much of the fiscal policy is still decided by the states. See California and its boatload of local taxes/regulations.

"If they did, states like Mississippi and Illinois would be the Greece of the US, in similarly dire circumstances."

Bailouts for financially weaker states are quite routine in the US. 10 billion handout wouldn't create much ado over there. When Greece crisis hit, US financists commented that Eurozone should have had a rapid bailout mechanism in place from the beginning, and started administering handouts way before the full-scale panic.

Stopped buying Oracle's kit? You've literally decimated its profit

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Big Red in red shocker

What? Too soon?

Lester Haines: RIP

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"Perhaps LOHAN needs to be renamed to LESTER, not an acronym"

Lester would not miss an opportunity to conjure up another backronym. It would be fitting to return the favour. Or at least try to.

Launching Exceptional Spacecraft Towards Edges of Realm?

Thank you, Lester, for daring to be a joyful chap despite life's little challenges.

Forget your stupid campus party. I'm going to Frankfurt to do some HPC

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Fair question. But Frankfurt am Main dwarfs the other so thoroughly that it's almost forgivable to forget.

Check where the first wiki link is redirected:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_am_Main

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_(Oder)

Queen's birthday honours shower knighthoods and gongs on tech's finest

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: No gong

Copy-paste from his last column would suffice.

¡Bong!

m.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/10/dont_let_the_barmy_brexiteers_wreck_digital_europe/

Samsung: Don't install Windows 10. REALLY

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Think

No, he meant modding the BIOS to remove the WiFi card whitelist. Search for "Error 1802".

Helium... No. Do you think this is some kind of game? Toshiba intros 8TB desktop drive

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Longevity

"Standard drives are not sealed."

They are not sealed against atmospheric pressure. But there are seals against dust. By design, air should get in only through the filter attached to the breather hole. What I was talking about: if the dust seal starts to deteriorate, foreign particles may enter through the seal and end up on the platter. Or the seal itself decomposes into flying debris.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Longevity

That's right, helium drives need another level of manufacturing quality.

Previous drives have had plenty of sealing failures. In best cases it increases media error rates slightly, in worst cases seals can disintegrate so badly that they'll become a source of serious contamination.

$10bn Oracle v Google copyright jury verdict: Google wins, Java APIs in Android are Fair Use

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Phew...

"APIs are a method. Methods are not copywriteable."

Case revolves around method names, not their underlying code - which has been rewritten anyway.

Microsoft's Windows Phone folly costs it another billion dollars

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Nominative determinism

Author was probably playing on widely known "Oy vey!".

Voland's right hand is, well, right. In Slavic and Fenno-Ugric languages sound like "Oy" marks either pain (ow! my balls!) or not-so-pleasant surprise (oops! or ouch!). Not sure about Swedish. But exclamation Oi! is present in older forms of English, so why not Swedish and Norwegian too.

Hypersonic flight test hits Mach 7.5

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Completely off topic...

You just need more of it. Try large amounts of bovine. With a sufficient thrust it'll fly just fine.

Yes, I grew up doing just that - shovelling around tons and tons of bovine excrement. Little did I know that it'll be the most useful skill for a modern $workplace. Metaphorically speaking of course.

HD and SSD Prices not declining - why ?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: How to Recover Dissertation writing Files from Storage device?

On the second thought, usage is not too complicated. Biggest concern is to identify devices properly and not to overwrite wrong disk or stick.

- boot from rescue CD

- connect your preciousss to USB port

- connect empty disk/stick to another USB port, same size would be preferred

- use sginfo /dev/sda (then sdb, sdc etc) to read device information - that helps to identify them

- use command dmesg ¦ grep sd ¦ more to see what devices and partitions were detected

- if your preciousss was found as /dev/sdb, dmesg may report some partitions on it, like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdb4

- in addition, ls /dev/sd* shows all disks/partitions that are present

- less -f /dev/sdb then gives a peek at the raw data on sdb (if it's readable at all). q for quitting the viewer.

- and now for the dangerous part. It is absolutely necessary to know which device is which. Double-check, triple-check, make no assumptions here.

- ddrescue /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 will clone a first partition on sdb to a first partition on sdc. Obviously overwriting sdc1. May warn about the dangers and ask for --force parameter.

- ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc will clone the whole device. This is quite OK for harddisks and SSDs, but not always healthy for USB sticks - some of them may keep secret areas in their logical block address space and do not like overwriting them. Heavily depends on the make and firmware.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: How to Recover Dissertation writing Files from Storage device?

It would be wise to take a block-level clone of the device, or even two, and perform any recovery attempts on a copy.

I'd suggest SystemRescueCD + ddrescue for cloning. Windows-based utilities probably won't work, as Windows doesn't give raw access to storage devices. But if you are not familiar with device operations under Linux, get someone to help.

www.sysresccd.org

Chaps make working 6502 CPU by hand. Because why not?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Static?

Funnily though, it was possible to underclock AMD 386 - down to a couple of Hz. Whereas Intel 386's did not appreciate underclocking them for more than 10-15%. Probably due to the fact that AMD implementation was fully static CMOS.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: I'll really be impressed when..

"From memory, yes: the X and Y registers had different capabilities when it came to the indirect/offset addressing modes."

Wasn't only Y usable for offset addressing? Load base address in Y, and then use one-byte offset as an argument for a command. Much faster than using two-byte addresses. Also, there were some register ops available to work with contents of Y - that had no counterparts for X.

Storage array firmware bug caused Salesforce data loss

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Circuit breakers broke bad

Maybe they started to run a meth lab besides their daily job?

Inside Electric Mountain: Britain's biggest rechargeable battery

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Battery or capacitor

"If we shy away from using words because we fear people won't understand them we'll just reduce the number of words that people do understand."

And the result would be...Upgoer Five!

xkcd.com/1133/

Sick of storage vendors? Me too. Let's build the darn stuff ourselves

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Anyone can build something small

But, but, iSCSI over 10 GbE ought to be enough for anyone?

/troll.jpg/

Spied upon by GCHQ? You'll need proof before a court will hear you...

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"people with power never give it up willingly"

They rarely do, but it happens, with Cincinnatus being the most famous example.

Sysadmin paid a month's salary for one day of nothing

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sticky platters

"When was 'back then'?"

Preceeding two comments were talking about nineties. Load ramps started to appear in notebook drives after 95 or thereabouts, and it took few more years to see them in server drives.

Older drives used a dedicated parking track. But heads could still get stuck on that.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Sticky platters

Yes, stiction was a serious problem back then. Disks without load/unload ramps had to rest their heads on platters, so any types of percussion had to be administered very carefully.

The gentlest way to handle it was to take the disk out and shake it gently along the spindle axis. Chances were pretty good it would start after that.

Advice please. https 192.168.0.10 shows IT support website?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Advice please. https 192.168.0.10 shows IT support website?

If you're still curious, use nslookup and traceroute (tracert on Windows) on that address, maybe they'll shed some light at the issue.

But whichever way we look at it, jake is still right - 192.168.x addresses are reserved for private networks and should not escape into the wild world. Somebody has seriously messed up.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Advice please. https 192.168.0.10 shows IT support website?

By default, Windows machines will try to register their IP & other connection details in the DNS. Then it's up to DNS admin - whether they do allow registration requests from workstations, and if they do, are those registrations allowed to propagate upstream.

Looks like someone forgot their DNS wide open.

This is what a root debug backdoor in a Linux kernel looks like

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Whoops

Well, if they provide security and stability patches, then 2.x kernel shouldn't be problematic.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Whoops

You mean Red Hat enterprise kernels? They keep major version at 2.6, quite intentionally. Most of the 3.x and 4.x developments are rolled in under minor revision numbers.

ww2 airplane geek? ever wondered about mach 1 w props?

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

AFAIR one Me 163 flight did achieve supersonic speed, but was nearly torn apart by flutter. For 262 it's unlikely that the airframe could stay intact long enough to reach the sound barrier. Small pieces perhaps did.

Insurance article

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Insurance article

Comments are intact. But not easy to find.

I do recall that thread as an intelligent discussion. 2 comments can be seen here:

m.forums.theregister.co.uk/user/47702/

Microsoft half-bricks Asus Windows 7 PCs with UEFI boot glitch

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: A deal with the devil

Icons! Fresh icons! Get yer icons from here!

forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/containing/2777279

Database man flown to Hong Kong to install forgotten patch spends week in pub

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Ah, Paris

"During the meeting a certain volcano in Iceland goes foom! and grounds all air traffic."

Heh. The ever so memorable Eyjafjallajökull.

One lovely young lady got stranded in Prague, facing a bedazzling choice of locally brewed beer. The downside of it - she only drinks wine. Would have probably traded Prague for Paris in a heartbeat.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"And I'd hung around to find the heater, and make sure it booted properly and didn't need to chkdsk."

No heater has received such a care before. Are you secretly preparing for Rise of the Heaters?

/beer.jpg/

UK govt admits it pulled 10-year file-sharing jail sentence out of its arse

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

There's a proper term for that: policy-based evidencemaking.

A Brit cloud biz and an angry customer wanting a refund: A Love Story

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Engineers require a BEng, ~BEng = technician at best

John Cohn has "Mad Scientist" written on his businesscard. Seems close enough.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: "Everyone's an Engineer"

"Rockstar Coders, Ninja Sysadmins, Database Gurus"

And DevOps Borats.

IBM's FlashSystem looks flashy enough, but peek under the hood...

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Comedy Photo?

No, picture is clearly different from XIV. I've seen Gen 2 up close. Lots of cables on the backside. Power cables on the left, fibre/ethernet cables on the right, all neatly arranged and colour-coded.

This picture looks like a development machine, definitely not a serial production.

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Comedy Photo?

XIV has rather neatly arranged cabling. I sure hope this is an early model. Or a pre-release one.

Ex-HP boss Carly Fiorina sacked one week into new job

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

"It's pity that Trump didn't pick her... he might be out of the race now."

Even better angle - who would have fired the other first? That's a reality show material right there.

Daft draft anti-car-hack law could put innocent drivers away for life

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Emergency services?

Oh. Why lug around a heavy set of hydraulic jaws when you could use a laptop?

The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Estonian ID cards tell you who is snooping

It's not a quality of ID cards as such (which are mostly 2-factor authentication systems and bugger else), but a quality of related services, and most importantly, a quality of legislative framework. If there are laws stating that citizen is entitled to see who's been accessing his/her private records, and on what grounds, it should be a good thing. Provided that these laws are actually followed and enforced. That there are not too many "special" and secret exceptions to the rule. Heh. Getting on the swampy ground already.

Undergoing criminal investigation/surveillance is obviously one of those exceptions - it's a bit daft to reveal data queries in realtime, as it may tip off the perpetrator. On the other hand it is very dangerous to provide an authority to hide the queries. That'll get abused in no time. Maybe there's a middle ground available. Like delaying their publication for the period of investigation (strictly under judicial oversight) and updating the record afterwards. Just like it's done with the phone tapping - third parties who happen to converse with a person under surveillance will eventually get a notification that their phonecalls from period /.../ were being recorded in connection with a criminal investigation of /.../, and they are entitled to review these materials if they so desire.

And of course the elephant in the room - secret services and their covert operations. I would be mightily surprised if there was a country under the sun where citizens would be informed of being a 'person of interest' for local spycatchers, even if the interest happened to be erroneous.

Interestingly, for Estonian ID card it is not mandatory to activate its digital certificates. Or using it for anything else than scraping the ice off the windshield. But it is mandatory to have the card.

Ref:

eesti.ee

id.ee

If you work on Seagate's performance drives, time to find another job

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: A death and decline so easily forseen...

Difficult times indeed. And their quality issues in last 7-8 years haven't been exactly helping. Enterprise drives, nearline drives, consumer drives - all suffer from premature media wear and nasty firmware bugs. About the only saving grace was that WDC/Hitachi chaebol had troubles of its own and could not produce enough kit to wipe the floor clean.

Sorry, just had to stick this in. It's actually relevant from the market viewpoint. Big buyers are faced with a tough choice: Seagate produces lemons, Hitachi drives are expensive and unavailable, SSD's are eyewateringly expensive and have their teething problems. But unlike other two, SSD situation is rapidly improving, so it makes more sense to invest there.

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

Re: Today????

"Given inflation,mightn't the Pound be now worth what thruppence was then?"

Not exactly, but close enough. 80 thruppences = one decimal pound by 1971 decimal conversion. By consumer price indexes there has been roughly 1:40 price increase between 1946 and 2015.

So one 1946 thruppence would be worth half a quid these days . For 1:80 CPI ratio we have to go back to 1916.