* Posts by Down not across

1987 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Mar 2013

Oracle? On my server? I must have been hacked! *Penny drops* Oh sh-

Down not across

Re: bleh...

commit confirm <minutes-default-10>

Cisco box config always feels so antiquated compared to Junper.

I used Cisco kit for years before ending hands-on on any Juniper kit so perhaps bit more comfortable with it and quirks of IOS. Having said that, I use both and I'd say they both have their pros and cons.

Juniper may have the edge in more value for money if you look at what you need to pay for the kit to get the throughput you want.

Down not across

Re: bleh...

On a Cisco router (note: I haven't logged into a Cisco CLI in over a decade, so beware of fading memory and outdated knowledge):

#rel in 5

Yes. Its funny how quick one learns that one, especially if it involves driving down to Telehouse with a laptop to fix an ACL on a router that didn't have remote console at the time.

Down not across

Re: 128K of ISDN

I raise you X.25.

Umm, with apologies to anyone who had to wrestle with HSSI and SunLink.

Gemini goes back to the '90s with Agenda, Data and mulls next steps

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Do design rights expire? http://oldcomputers.net/zeos-ppc.html

I had HP-95LX (and HP-110 which wasn't exactly pocketable, but was handy as a terminal plus it had HP-IL) which was nice. Nowhere as good as Psion 3 and 5 though. I have fond memories of dialing up with Psion using Nokia phone as a modem via IR to log in to some boxen at work.

I was very tempted by the Gemini and nearly backed it. I'm glad backers have actually gotten the kit. I am also glad I didn't back it as it sounds like it would've fallen short of my expectations.

Facebook's new always-listening home appliance kit Portal doesn't do Facebook

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Re: I'm still amazed

More appropraitely may be a short story (might be by Asimov) I once read based around a murder investigation in the future where everyone communicates via video screens most of the time...

It has been a long time since I read Asimov's Robot series (with Elijah Baley and R Daneel Olivaw), but that story sounds like The Naked Sun.

Rookie almost wipes customer's entire inventory – unbeknownst to sysadmin

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Re: .cobol

Probably designed by the same person who designed the crontab app then, with the command line options -e to edit and -r to remove immediately without confirmation. Misstype at your peril...

Using crontab -e is asking for trouble even without mistypes. I've see too many corrupted or truncated crontabs after someone has edited them with crontab -e. crontab -l > crontab.txt;vi crontab.txt;crontab crontab.txt is much better way.

You mean not everyone has crontab entry that backs up crontab at least daily?

My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background

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In my area, the farmers adopted computers rather quickly. New combines came with the ability to store data for optimizing everything from best time to harvest, most economic harvest track, who had the lead foot amongst the drivers, maintenance schedules etc.

The amount of computers and automation in modern tractors and combines etc is quite staggering.

Huawei guns for Apple with Mac-alike Matebook X

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Crappy broadcom chipsets

weird internal broadcom Is the bane of your existence if you use linux. Hell there is no guarantee it will work right on any thing les then the newest version of windows when it was released

Hear hear.

I suppose one could reduce windows to minimal Virtualbox (or whatever your chosen virtualisation solution is) host if the hardware proves not to play nice with Linux or BSD natively. Not ideal of course but sometimes needs must.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

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Re: You all Astronauts on some kind of Star Trek?

I still think its a rip off of Heavy Metal even if the car is not likely to land anywhere. Oh, and I'm glad its a Tesla rather than classic Corvette.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Another Amazon Key door-lock hack

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Amazon delivery staff is supposed to...

Amazon, in a statement, has downplayed the attack, saying its systems should be able to detect if a door is left unlocked for too long, and that delivery staff should check the front door is locked before leaving.

Just like they're not supposed to just leave the parcel on the doorstep in plain view?

ServiceNow plans non-devs writing non-code for real enterprise apps

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Re: I confidently predict

Can't be any worse than SN itself is. Can it?

I want life to be boring, says Linus Torvalds as Linux 4.15 debuts

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Re: Tell it like it is

> cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2

Oh the joy of not needing to keep a marketing department on board.

Yes. Marketing would insist on substituting "features" for "vulnerabilities".

The Reg visits London Met Police's digital and electronics forensics labs

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Re: Mobira

Cityman was excellent phone. Cityman 900 was the first phone that was worthy of replacing my old NMT450 kit. I had it with the full car kit too (handsfree speaker and handset (fairly slim) that dujplicated the display and keypad). Truly excellent. And it survived any accidental abuse it experienced. Oh and it would crush any other phone, literally...

P.S. Been a while since I saw Wall Street, but didn't Gecko have a crappy Motorola DynaTAC?

ServiceNow unleashes its 'Kingston' release

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Re: Company How?

I've had to endure their product a few times, and whilst no ticketing systems are "great", SN is really way down the list towards the shit end of things.

I'm afraid I have to disagree. They've invented a whole new level way below any lists. I've used many ITSM tools over decades but SN really makes even the worst ones look good.

Meltdown/Spectre fixes made AWS CPUs cry, says SolarWinds

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Re: Great Scott

Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?

Seagate's CES splash, ClusterStor-like dash and Ripple crypto-cash

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Re: DotHill Based Solution

I'm surprised they're still in business given their early arrays and firmware. I guess they must've eventually gotten their act together then.

SpaceX delivers classified 'Zuma' payload into orbit

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Re: Mars Orbit?

Everyone knows that it should be a Classic Corvette Convertible.

Shouldn't it be playing Radar Rider by Riggs rather than Bowie.

WD My Cloud NAS devices have hard-wired backdoor

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Re: Glad I didn't buy one ...

... I went for an HP microserver which was actually cheaper.

I did the same. Back in the day all the NAS's were too expensive and limited, so I bought HP Microserver N36L on one of those cashback deals. Running NAS4Free (since the split up... was running FreeNAS before that) nicely from USB stick with all 4 bays for ZFS. I did add a intel quad GE NIC though as the onboard one would lock up on heavy traffic.

We translated Intel's crap attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare

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Re: Old is new again?

Positive, he's the only person running it :-)

Nah, no he isn't. I have house full of SPARC (and plenty of other non x86) boxen. Come to think of it anything doing any real work is AMD or not x86. Couple of gaming machines do have i5 or i7 but thats it.

Big shock: $700 Internet-of-Things door lock not a success

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Re: I'm disappointed

There are already access systems and thumbprint readers so this new $700 lock is not new and it's anything but cheap. I'd bet an existing company making access systems now could knock out a consumer grade one for well under half the price and likely be more secure and still make a good profit at it. The fact they don't means there's probably not enough of a market.

Like Yale Doorman (about 350 euros or so). Or perhaps ILOQ PRIVUS. There are products (and IMHO better ones if you need the flexibility of controlling access without changing the locks) than some IoT junk.

Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

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Happy

Re: Hmmm... @Peter Gathercole

I think we need to return to PDP11, where you had ...

The only reason I would need is,well,PDP11.. nuff said.

Down not across

10 years?!

It is understood the bug is present in modern Intel processors produced in the past decade. It allows normal user programs – from database applications to JavaScript in web browsers – to discern to some extent the contents of protected kernel memory.

That's taken long time to surface then.

Guess it has been quite useful for 5-eyes.

ALPHABET TOTALLY LOSES ITS SCHMIDT: Exec chairman Eric quits

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Re: Then end is Nigh (hopefully)

Then end is Nigh (hopefully)

For your spying on all of us.

Except, sadly it is not usually possible to put the genie back into the bottle.

Surveillance law slip-up in sight for staff stalking citizens on socials

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Re: Simply follow sensible advice.

Never use your real name on the net!

Of course, none of El Reg's esteemed readership would ever dream of doing anything nefarious, but it pays to be cautious.

I suspect most of the commentards know and do that.

The problem is that there are family and/or friends etc and no appreciable control on what they do. Hence even if you completely abstain from social media, chances are others are putting you out there whether you like it or not.

Yes, your old iPhone is slowing down: iOS hits brakes on CPUs as batteries wear out

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Pool not aware of other manufacturers limiting speed

Poole, in a phone interview with The Register, said iPhone users have been complaining for a while about performance problems related to batteries. "But I'm not aware of any other manufacturer limiting processor speed due to performance concerns," he said.

Yes they have. For example HP issued a firrmware that clocked the GPU down back when they (and many others) had issues with nVidia laptop GPUs.

Mine had already died/de-soldered itself so no idea how well that "fix" would've worked. Kind of shitty thing to do (in HP's case) when there is actually hardware/manufacturing issue that they denied existed on some chassis (when exact same issue was acknowleged on other chassis after a flood of complaints) not to mention that they're really downgrading what you've bought after you've bought it.

(This post does not contain an opinion on the Apple situation)

Dump ur mobile provider via txt by 2019: LMFAO cu l8r

Down not across

Re: Apple and Google could build this in

Create a little "change your provider" app, or make it part of settings. One step closer to getting rid of the SIM entirely

No thanks. I prefer physical SIM. At least then if my phone dies (or runs out of battery or something) I can easily put the SIM into another handset, either temporarily or more permanently.

Hot chips crashed servers, but were still delicious

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Re: Power Cables...

That's usually OK provided the other end of the structured wiring connects to a suitable device.

Quite. USOC and T-568A are quite coimpatible for even two phone lines (assuming RJ11 in this case is for POTS). This is not a coincidence. Of course plugging RJ11 into RJ-45 is not too kind on the outer pins and may well up damaging them.

Developers, developers, developers: How 'serverless' crowd dropped ops like it's hot

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Re: Cloud, REST, HTTP, PHP, trendy NoSQL DB de-jour, blah blah, whatever...

Furthermore, you *can* run your Oracle cluster in Amazon - it's called RDS for Oracle. Whether it's more cost-effective at terabyte size to have your own hardware + licencing + DR + sysadmin team, rather than using RDS, is something you'll have to evaluate for yourself.

It's not really a cluster. Not the way RAC is. RDS also has size limitation. You pay more for your licensing on AWS than you would on premises. Also, don't forget to factor in things like network traffic in your costing.

IETF mulls adding geoblock info to 'Bradbury's code'

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Re: Geoblock is evil and dishonest

I also have Short Time on laserdisc. Now THERE is an obsolete format. I can't just buy a drive and rip it!

I still prefer LaserDisc to DVD. You can try to pry my CLD-D925 from my dead cold hands but odds are not good.

What the fdisk? Storage Spaces Direct just vanished from Windows Server in version 1709

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Re: @bombastic bob You're expecting sense?

And now you have systemd...

Not on BSD you don't.

If you have to use Linux you will need to tread more carefully. Luckily it can be excised in many cases and there is always Devuan to avoid it altogether.

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd reads 'mean tweets' about his 2025 vision

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If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Hey Mark,

You're in quite visible and public position. You say things, people will respond or comment. Newflash, we humans have a habit of not always agreeing with each other. If you can't stomach it when people disagree with you then you're in the wrong job and at the very least should perhaps stop opening your mouth in public.

Just out of sheer kindness I will not say what I think about you or your comments.

SPARC will fly: Your cheat sheet for cocktail banter at Oracle's upcoming shindig

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Re: SPARC worlds fastest

Intel Xeon 8180 outperforms SPARC M7. Comfortably so.

Whoosh! Not everything is about sheer compute.

Twitter reckons Trump's Nork-baiting tweet was 'newsworthy'

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Re: What is saddest thing is

Perhaps they COULD solve this whole problem by banning them both and making them actually talk to each other for a change.

Dunno, I think they should follow Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Two Tribes. I'm sure you all remember the Reagan vs Chernenko match in the video.

UK Prime Minister calls on internet big beasts to 'auto-takedown' terror pages within 2 HOURS

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Re: How about...

Just stop serving UK customers. "Unfortunately due to poltical climate it is no longer viable to provide our services into the UK."

Of course there are ways around that but that is another matter entirely.

Dell EMC refreshes its entry-level arrays

Down not across

Still looks like a good option for DR though, where performance won't matter that much

...unless you actually need to fail over to DR.

NASA Earthonauts emerge from eight-month isolation in simulated Mars visit

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Re: Hmmm

I was thinking Ascension.

DRM now a formal Web recommendation after protest vote fails

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Re: Time matters

Probably way past time we 'forked' the internet anyway - it's become increasingly a shopping /TV channel with filled with propaganda and looney mainstream fringe junk myths, lies and idiocy instead of useful information of benefit to humanity.

Oh, and bring back Technocracy.

Oh we could just go back to gopher. Archie and veronica are dead, but Veronica-2 is probably still alive although haven't checked recently.

Yes, I still have gopher running.

Brit ministers jet off on a trade mission to tout our digital exports...

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Re: Ha

Oh, and, of course, we know there's £350 million a week been found behind the same sofa that found extra money for Northern Ireland…

Oh you mean the £350 million* before rebate which is applied before any money leaves the treasury. And then you get back farming subsidies, investment in research etc.

*If I recall correctly the actual gross amount was fair bit less than £350 million anyway so even ignoring gross vs net, the number was inflated.

UK's new Data Protection Bill will be 'liberal' not 'libertarian', says digi minister

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Re: RE: Sovereignty

I think you mean in addition to. Pretty sure the Great Firewall of Cheltenham will have straight feed into other five eyes.

Down not across

@wolfetone

I'm sure the "greater penalties" part will. Citizens will be breaking the rules afterall. I don't think I even need to quote the Cardinal.

Five ways Apple can fix the iPhone, but won't

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Re: Smaller - tougher? - display please

Why we can't see a return to flip & slider phones is beyond me.

Good question. For some reason they don't want to offer them here.

Its not like they don't do some.

Oracle to shutter most Euro hardware support teams

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Do Oracle's existing customers still have Oracle on their longer term road map?

If the answer is yes, then why?

Most likely yes.

It wouldn't surprise me of many SPARC/Solaris shops wouldn't have virtualised on LDOMs and containers. The T4 and T5 series have pretty nice support for virtualising Solaris environments in a resilient way.

It is easy to forget that many large corporations (telcos especially come to mind) have long history on Sun hardware and may have bespoke software written specifically for the platform with proven and predictable performance.

Of course it no doubt could be migrated, but why risk it. As I mentioned virtualisation options on later T-series enables sweating the assets lot better than some of the older hardware so migrating onto x86 for example may not yield such great savings.

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Re: In other words

If you have ANY Oracle Hardware in Europe then it is time to Sell, Sell, Sell, Sell.

You will be lucky to get any support in future.

There are no shortage on third parties offering hardware and software support for Sun^WOracle products.

I suspect many will heed your advice on selling out, which should yield plenty of perfectly serviceable kit/spares on fleabay.

Bosch wants crowdsourced data for future connected cars

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Bosch have been making automotive electronic systems for donkeys years.

Yeah, I remeber playing around with D-Jetronic fuel injection in the 70s.

David Potter rejoins 'New New Psion' as Hon.Chairman

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Re: Blackberry

I'd love to see this design using x86. Proper computer, none of this Android stuff.

It's Mediatek SoC (so ARM cores), dual boots into Debian or Android. So if if you boot into Debian you have pretty much a proper computer. For battery powered device, I think ARM is better choice than x86.

And no, I did not back it. I almost did, but wasn't prepared to gamble that amount of money. If it becomes a reality I'll probably by one once the bugs are ironed out and the price is somewhat reasonable.

Confirmed: Oracle laid off 964 people from former Sun building

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Re: I need new glasses..

This isn't true. Mainframes have higher clock speeds than x86, but more importantly, they do more per clock tick than x86. When I was working on mainframe (some years ago now), I saw so many applications migrated onto x86 that then performed like a dog. The straight line performance of a x86 thread is nowhere near that of a mainframe thread.

And here is a good lesson for young 'uns. It is not all about clock speed.

I remember people frothing about how much faster x86 was compared to SPARC. When you actually built a x86 testbed to compare (yes, tested with both Solaris x86 and Linux) it ran like a dog. The x86 platform (yes this was long ago so even so called server platforms were not that much more advanced than desktops) just had nowhere near the I/O capability of the Sun box which run fine no matter (within reason) what you threw at it.

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Re: I need new glasses..

Do we want the world of operating systems to become the same? With all these operating systems being stopped, are we likely to end up in a world with only RedHat and Windows as the operating systems for companies?

No.

At least Poettering has not implemented some auto update, that cannot be disabled, into systemd...

On a more serious note, I agree. We need the variety and competition.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

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What about an updated version of Psion's EPOC? :p Just joking... Symbian is all but forgotten nowadays, and it does not make sense in trying to upgrade/update it.

Perhaps my memories are too fond, but I don't agree that it wouldn't make sense to update it. It is/was bloody great OS for the purpose. It was lightweight and did what it needed to do quite well. Lets not forget that Psion 3 (and even 5 to some extent) ran very well on 2 AA batteries.

All the extras coming with "more full featured" OS will consume power.

I now wonder if there really is a market for a real reboot of any kind of old Psion (or whatever) hardware, but with touch-screen LCD (readable in sunlight) as well as long battery power. Should you need colour, just cast your screen to a compatible screen and continue working.

I'd say so. Monochrome is quite enough for normal PDA type tasks and terminal emulation. If you had colour capability to external screen either wirelessly or via HDMI then that could embiggen the market even more I guess.

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Re: Can we stop calling it a Psion please?

To be honest, I was very disappointed when that didn't really moved with the whole mobile phone shenanigans - I would have fought for a phone where you could cook up some simple OPL to make things happen for you (I think Apple is trying this with Swift, but it just doesn't compare).

You never had a Nokia Communicator then? OPL was one of the things I loved about it.

I really wish Nokia would get HMD to make a new one. Why yes, running Symbian of course.

Everyone loves programming in Python! You disagree? But it's the fastest growing, says Stack Overflow

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Re: Usefulness

he fact that the python community has coined the word pythonic when few other languages have coined anything similar is interesting from a social point of view but of no technical importance. I concur with the OP: Who cares whether it conforms to the "right" way of doing it.

I concur. Bunch of elitist bullshit really.

Perl: TIMTOWTDI

Python: There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.

No wonder I prefer perl where what matters is that the task gets done, rather than getting hung up on how exactly.

As for whitespaces...yeah it worked for COBOL but at least there was a reason (punch cards) for it and AFAIK no modern compiler actually insists on that any more.