Posts by theOtherJT

The Psion returns! Meet Gemini, the 21st century pocket computer

That display...

...is about the only thing here that's annoying me.

2880x1440? For a 5.7" display? WHY?!

I'm sorry guys but that's just pointless. There's no way I can possibly see the difference between that and one at 1920x960 on a device that size and you'd be far better served conserving the battery power than pushing pixels that are too small for my eyes to see. Frankly 1920x960 is still probably too high. I'd be perfectly happy with something in the 1440x720 sort of area for all practical purposes.

Re: I want one

Where are you getting that from? Is there a crowd-funding link somewhere I've missed?

Bring it BACK... with MODs! Psion 5 storms great tech revival poll

It's the keyboard.

That's what really made the 5. That keyboard was actually usable, unlike any other mobile device before or, frankly, since. If you want to be productive you need to be able to input lots of data quickly and reliably, and that's what you can do with a decent keyboard - and exactly what you can't do with a touch screen.

Yes, having a keyboard like that made it a bit big for today's fashion conscious "it'll spoil the line of my suit / won't fit in the pocket of my ball crushing skinny jeans" crowd, but it fits perfectly well in the inside pocket of a normal jacket so if what you care about is being able to work on it, not pose about with it, it's just better to have a keyboard that size.

Samsung's Chromebook Pro: Overpriced vanilla PC with a stylus. 'Wow'

Absolutely. If I can get debian on this thing I will almost certainly buy one. Looks like an excellent alternative to my aging zenbook.

SQL Server on Linux? HELL YES! Linux on Windows 10? Meh

bash on Windows...

is actually kinda useless at the moment. The problem is that as soon as you start bash on Windows, you're in a totally different environment. You even have to create a separate user for it, making it a completely disconnected experience.

You can't do a lot of things either. Windows tools to manage the OS like ipconfig don't exist there... and neither do their Linux counterparts. I'm not entirely sure what it's meant to be for.

More tech companies join anti-Trump battle, but why did some pay for his inauguration?

Re: This is surprising because?

You know Anon, it's much easier to take people's claims of employable value seriously when they're prepared to put their own name to them. It does sound a bit like "I've got a 10 inch dick, just don't expect me to prove it" otherwise...

Netherlands reverts to hand-counted votes to quell security fears

Not much point tho.

So, the machine prints a paper trail. A copy of that trail can go to the voter, but unless the voter then puts that paper copy in a box somewhere to be counted later during your sanity check, how do they know that the machine has printed the same result on the paper that is going to be recounted?

Once you're printing a paper copy and then putting it in a box, all you've done is created a really fucking expensive way of marking things on a piece of paper. Which we can already do with a pencil.

I'll just leave this here.

Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile

Brexit White Paper published: Broad strokes, light on detail

Re: Let's privatise the negotiations

I'm sure they'd get a good deal for Capita...

Re: Words fail me

MPs serve the people, not the other way around.

I wonder then why it is that despite an overwhelming victory for remain in this constituency, my constituency MP decided not to vote that way?

I wonder further why it is that we're going to undergo a colossal constitutional change based off an informational referendum won by a margin of victory of only 2%

Possibly neither the opinion of their constituents nor their own good conscious is actually driving this one.

Re: Page 33, Chart 7.1

Edited. Good thing I'm not in charge of producing governmental papers... or possibly it wouldn't matter.

Re: Words fail me

Roll on 2019 when the whole stupid thing gets dumped, along with May and her crazy friends.

I bloody wish. This nonsense is happening regardless. 494 votes in favour 114 against? You couldn't find 114 MP's who actually wanted to do this before the referendum, but here we are and suddenly everyone's determined to stick it out regardless of the consequences.

Page 33, Chart 7.1

They have the middle two bars the wrong way around.

I mean, it's only an official white-paper regarding the largest single change to UK law in the last 40 years. Let's not worry about getting it right, eh?

I wonder what other wonderful details will turn out to be "Mistakes"?

The budget for the NHS perhaps?

What's the difference between you and a sea slug? When it comes to IT security, nothing

Not a lot of options here.

So, it's a fact that we're wired to ignore things that are repetitious. Well, ok, that's not terribly surprising, leaving us with the task of making the things not repetitious, right?

Our options aren't good for that. We've got:

• Lock the warning to the foreground and refuse to dismiss it, until it is acted upon in a satisfactory manner.
• Vary the appearance of the warning every time to minimise the repetition.
• Don't show warnings at all.

None of these are good.

1 will make people angry. Especially if there's any possibility for false positives. Not to mention the fact that most users will be incapable of following the instructions presented, even if they're 2 lines long, in big letters and don't use any words of more than 2 syllables. 2 will work for a while, but then cease to be effective anyway, and 3 is basically giving up.

What we really need to address is that users should never see security warnings, because they should be being protected by their operating environment from things going wrong in the first place. When one does appear it needs to be a surprising once-a-month-if-that sort of event.

Microsoft sued by staff traumatized by child sex abuse vids stashed on OneDrive accounts

Re: For all you you screaming "Muh Privacy"

Onedrive is built into Windows 10 and Office and made the default location.

And that was but one of many straws that broke the dromedary for me. I might be stuck with the damn thing at work, but that's work's problem. I've made my objections clear and have been over-ruled, so... fine. That's the way things are. I presume our legal people will have to deal with the compatibility between that and our data protection obligations one day.

I'm not putting up with it on any hardware I own.

You have the right to be informed: Write to UK.gov, save El Reg

How impartial are the regulators?

...or "regulator", as it seems that there's only one that's on the approved list here.

This to me seems to be the real nub of this question. If everyone's happy that impress is a genuinely impartial body then I don't see that there's a problem here - the rule does what it's nominally intended to do and provides a route for those of little means to take on the press.

Of course if that regulator is in the pocket of people who intend to use it to silence criticism of them and their business/political/criminal* dealings then we have a massive fucking problem here.

I'd be happy to write to write and object to this, if I had an answer to that question and I thought it was appropriate, but with only slightly more than an hour to go I don't feel that it's possible that I can make that determination with any degree of confidence.

*often hard to tell the difference, I know

I was a robot and this is what I learned

Fascinating read.

Do you think the problems you encountered were more technological (the machine not being fast/manoeuvrable/tall enough to keep up) or human (people being dicks because you're "just a robot") and if the problem was more down to people being, shall we say, unhelpful, do you think they'd be less likely to be discourteous to the thing if it were faster/more manoeuvrable/more imposing rather than looking somewhat like someone had glued a circa 2005 LCD monitor to an upright vacuum cleaner?

US Supreme Court slashes Samsung's patent payout to Apple

I still can't grasp...

...how the hell this ever made it to an appeals court.

The first judge to ever hear this case should have invalidated the patent for being utterly and obviously trivial, fined the both of them for wasting the courts time, and put a stop to all this shit before it got rolling.

UK NHS 850k Reply-all email fail: State health service blames Accenture

How does this sort of thing happen?

We don't use Exchange, so possibly I'm missing some exchangy concepts here but as I understand it someone foolishly sent out a mail to a ton of people on a list that probably shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Some of those people replied to that email - which, instead of being immediately sent back with an auto reply along the lines of "This address belongs to a mailing list daemon. If you wish to send email to this list, please email $LISTSENDADDRESS" was taken as an instruction to the mailer daemon to send that message to everyone on that particular list - which already feels like a pretty massive configuration cockup right there, but ok, that happened.

Even assuming that you made the mistake of having the reply-to being the send-out address, why then did every single one of these emails not get the next line of "Your message to this list requires approval. Please wait for this message to be approved by a list administrator" which should always be the case for lists that can hit tens of thousands of people for precisely this reason, and then sit in the mailer's approval queue?

Then - even assuming that THAT was allowed to happen for some reason, why doesn't the list daemon go "Holy shit, my queue is suddenly full of tens of thousands of messages, that's never happened before. I'd better rate limit those bastards and email my owner to warn them that something weird is happening." at which point it drip feeds messages out a few hundred at a time until someone comes along and tells it that it's OK, no one's account has been compromised and you're not being co-opted into some massive bulk spamming campaign, we really did mean to email the entire organisation.

Feels like a lot of config level school-boy errors had to be made to allow this to happen in the first place.

Whoosh! China shows off J-20 'stealth' fighters and jet drones

Re: Human waves

Zerg rushing. Coming soon to a real battlefield near you?

Adobe emits emergency patch for Flash hole malware is exploiting right this minute

Whist simultaneously making updating it harder...

This coming as it does a few weeks after Adobe pulled the "offline" flash installer from their downloads page and force you to apply for a "Distribution licence" to get it back. This application being a manual process where you fill in a form and they promise to email you back letting you know if your application has been successful, and then go silent.

Internet of Things botnets: You ain’t seen nothing yet

Re: telnet?

What's really the difference between HTTPing to port 80 and Telnetting to it?

I agree, up to a point, but you shouldn't be allowed to do that either. It ought to be https on 443 and the only thing it will present you with there is a login page.

I get why it wants a "non web" port open, so it can take commands from things that script automation, but if you're going to do that then there ought to be key exchange first.

telnet?

Seriously, this needs shooting in the head now. There's no reason for _anything_ to be using telnet these days, there really isn't.

That said, I actually had quite a bit of fun this weekend turning one of my friends's living room light on and off with my phone - rather to her annoyance - because the amazing wireless IoT lightbulb she'd acquired from somewhere was listening on port 23.

I mean, ok, I was already on her wifi so I didn't have to vault that particular hurdle to get at it, but why the HELL was it accepting anonymous connections at all?

Astronauts on long-haul space flights risk getting 'space brains'

Re: "...Earth’s magnetosphere deflected harmful radiation particles away."

I don't think their point is that this makes space travel impossible, but more that we really need to take seriously the requirement to do just what you suggest - which is not easy*, especially when you're in an energy constrained environment like a space ship. A magnetic field strong enough to deflect cosmic radiation from around the ship would presumably have a significant power requirement.

* Although possibly easier than coating the thing in a few feet of lead, given how much effort it takes to put heavy things in orbit.

Microsoft warns Windows security fix may break network shares

Re: Give them a break

Please tell me that's a thing that actually happened and link me to somewhere I can read about it. I could use a good laugh this morning.

USB-C is now wired for sound, just like Sir Cliff Richard

I don't have digital ears...

At some point we're going to have to turn this signal into something analogue for the purposes of moving some air about. I really don't get this obsession with trying to make a digital headphone connector.

Hello, Star Trek? 25th Century here: It's time to move on

Re: I have a speech...

Contemporary philosophy seems to be simply that there's nothing you can't solve with a big enough hammer

Well, you know the saying. "When all you have is a hammer..."

I think that was one of the most important things that Star Trek did. It convinced - if not actually millions certainly a very large number of thousands - of young people who watched it that we could, if we tried, have things that weren't hammers; and that having things that were not hammers was in fact beneficial.

I have a speech...

...that occasionally comes out when I'm a bit drunk about why the world badly needs Star Trek.

I genuinely believe that it does. Not just Star Trek either, but all the optimistic forward looking scifi that I used to watch across the kitchen table at dinner time in the 80s and early 90s - that itself so often a rerun of 60s or 70s stuff.

It was a little ray of light in the world. The present was bleak, but the future - in the future we could be better than we are. The world could be better than it really is if only we worked for it.

I don't really consider myself a "Fan". I'm not the sort of person who dresses up as a vulcan or even goes to conventions. I don't have a list of favourite episodes, I certainly couldn't _name_ any - but I have seen them all. Every episode of every season of every incarnation. Whilst a lot of them were pretty bad, over all, the message was good.

The future can be better than the present.

We can put all this pettiness behind us and go to the stars.

It will be - and should be - hard.

When I was a kid I sat down and watched good triumph over evil in epic space battles. I enjoyed the (now rather cheesy) effects, and the space ships, and things that went "Wooosh" - all that was great because I was a kid. What I didn't realise then, was that I was being subtly influenced to believe that it was possible for good to win - and most often by diplomacy and understanding, not just by superior military force. I was being taught that there is room for more than one idea. That we need to try and understand other cultures and social values - even if we can't embrace them. That there is such a thing as right and wrong and we should always stand up for what we know to be right. Very subtly I was being made a better person.

We live in particularly troubled times again it seems. So many issues from the 60s remain unresolved. So many new ones have arisen. It would be good for us to have Star Trek back, because I think there's a whole new generation of kids who need to be taught what I was taught.

I've seen very little of that in the new movies. I really hope the TV show can bring some of it back.

Latest Intel, AMD chips will only run Windows 10 ... and Linux, BSD, OS X

386, 486, good grief! Why on Earth are you keeping that junk? Let me guess...you keep using the same toothbrush until the last scraggly tuft falls out.

Because you find various perfectly servicable industrial machines that have an integrated controller with early 3/486 cpus in them. Nothing wrong with the machine, but you can't update the software any more, and you can't change the controlling machine because it uses some weird proprietary hardware so what to do? If you can put Linux on it chances are you can hack together some working control code, which is a damn sight easier than trying to work out how to get a modern PC to talk to whatever the hell it is.

When Irish eyes are filing: Ireland to appeal Europe's $15bn Apple tax claw-back

The Irish government may have calculated that the Irish economy might benefit more from having Apple operating in the country and maying minimal direct taxes than not operating there at all and paying none.

It might have, but I'm pretty sure it didn't. Ireland's corporation tax is already just about the lowest in Europe, Apple would have gone there anyway - all the other big multinationals seem to. The reason they're paying less is because they "negotiated" to. What such negotiations amounted to is of course entirely open to speculation...

Excel hell messes up ~20 per cent of genetic science papers

If excel is the answer...

...you probably didn't understand the question.

I have never seen excel used for anything that wouldn't have been better done with either (in order of frequency)

* Raw text.

* About 4 lines of bash script.

* A word document.

* A graphics package.

* An actual database.

I'm not even kidding about the graphics one. I've seen so many people use this abomination as a way to generate pretty looking timetable type graphics to be printed out and handed to students... which immediately goes wrong because the printed form doesn't look the way it did on their screen.

Still get at least 2 a year try it tho.

I'm sure there _is_ a use case for excel... but I've never actually met it.

Microsoft to overhaul Windows 10 UI – with a 3D Holographic Shell

Just one word, really...

Why?

Russia is planning to use airships as part of a $240bn transport project

Re: Fuel

I believe the approach today is to compress the helium to liquid as you go and allow successive compartments fill with atmosphere instead.

That said, I still don't really see this working.

Kaminsky: The internet is germ-ridden and it's time to sterilize it

Re: one step ahead..

"High functioning" That's what I keep telling myself. I'm "High functioning".

Forget card skimmers, chip-card shimmers will be your next nightmare

Re: Alternativly

I presume the reason being that you'd have to set up an account that was capable of accepting swipe payments. I don't know how that's done, but I would hope that a certain quantity of personal information would be required (and have to be verified) before the bank would start accepting tap payments flowing into that account.

Possibly you could try and attach it to a legitimate business account as an aside, but to make it worth while you'd have to scam so many people that surely the pattern of customers phoning their bank and saying "I didn't buy this. Why is this charge on my card?" would trace back to you before you made enough money to just close down the business and leave the country.

UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

SnoopersCharter

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Key => title.

UK.gov rolls out 10 years' chokey for industrial scale copyright pirates

Some studies have shown...

...that really popular torrents actually drive UP sales of the shared work because they cause it to reach an audience that wouldn't otherwise have known about it - rather like that spike in DVD sales that 'Python got when they put all their material on youtube. That being the case this wording:

(ii) knows or has reason to believe that communicating the work to the public will cause loss to the owner of the copyright, or will expose the owner of the copyright to a risk of loss.

becomes rather an interesting defence. "I don't know or have reason to believe that this will cause loss to the owner, as I chose to believe the aforementioned study that it actually does the opposite" I'm not sure what a court would make of that, but I'm sure some lawyers will enjoy finding out.

FTC wants a date with Ashley Madison's fembots

Virtual Cupid...

Yeah, guys, if you feel the need to advertise that fact so you can hold it up in the future against potential litigation, it's pretty fair to say you _expected_ to get sued, and therefore knew damn well what you were doing was sketchy as hell.

Raspberry Pi 3 tops SBC poll for self-brew hackers and Linux folk

Re: My nipples implode with despair

To call the result "Unsurprising" seems like an understatement.

Why use a Pi? Because it's like an order of magnitude cheaper than anything x86 and for the vast majority of people it'll be the only non x86 board they've ever heard of. Bit of a no brainer it seems to me, that.

OpenIO pulls up ARM controller SOCs: Kinetic's Marvellous... can anybody do it?

Re: Looking for a problem to solve...

It might work for us here - Instead of buying expensive servers full of expensive SAS RAID controllers which you have to keep populating with expensive SAS disks, and even more expensive flash caches, you could buy a cheap ethernet enclosure - basically a glorified switch with integrated drive caddies - and run something like CEPH where you just keep adding more disks as required.

The magic only works if the kinetic enclosure + disks is cheaper than the dedicated SAN server machine of course.

I'd really like to see them build these things with POE RJ45 sockets on the back so they could just be slapped straight onto an existing switch - but that's probably not actually all that useful once you're outside of a testing environment because the cable management would get annoying :/

Facebook: 'We don't listen'

"We don't listen"

Something that's been apparent to all of us bitching about them constantly messing around with the chat function for all these years.

Alphabetical order, facebook. That's all. Alphabetical order.

BOFH: What's your point, caller?

Re: How do I order a new keyboard online if this one is broken?

I like to play this game with our Telecoms department. "Please call us on $NUMBER to report any problems" - um... how? My phone hasn't worked since you switched it to the NEW (not the old new, or even the old, or god forbid the analogue one we had before that) VOIP system.

...actually, I'm fine with them not fixing it. It means users have to use the ticketing system because they can't call me.

Hypersonic flight test hits Mach 7.5

Re: Is this news?

Not sure either. I thought that high mach speeds were pretty much what rockets did - orbital velocity being somewhere around mach 20 IIRC. I guess if we had more details on what they were testing there might be something interesting or special in there?

Facebook's turbo-charged Instant Articles: Another brick in the wall

But who's going to use it?

The point of these "standards" such as they are - or even the CPP Specification - is to say "We wrote this page in a way devoid of annoying bloat"

...but the site owners are the ones including all that crud in the first place. They chose to do it - no one made them - and presumably they chose to do it because they have numbers that say that forcing flash ads and "Please sign up to our newsletter" popups actually _does_ increase site revenue.

To make them change, surely the first step is going to have to be to convince them otherwise, or else to the suits who sign off on the final site design, this is going to look like a deliberate attack on their revenue streams, and why on earth would they agree to that?

Modular phone Ara to finally launch

Re: That video

We've graduated from the information age in to the "Post-information" age where truth is irrelevant and facts are for losers. Get with the program. Ignorance is strength!

Microsoft shifts Windows 7 and 8.1 fixes to 'rollup' bundles

Re: "Microsoft could solve these problems 'easily'"

I'm sort of with you. I have a work laptop that runs windows 10 and it's fine. It's just a Windows PC. It does everything I want of it. The control panel/system settings split is a massive step backwards, but everything else - meh, it's fine.

I'm still never installing Win10 at home because I don't trust Microsoft to be responsible with the data they'll gather from it, or trust them not to break my machine with some future update that I'm not allowed to opt out of.

I don't control the work machine, so I don't care about the loss of control. That's someone else's department. I'm not prepared to tolerate it on a machine that I manage personally.

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

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

I have tried bloody everything :/

It's a well defined problem at least. The nfs-kernel-server process owns the lock on the file. Since nfs-kernel-server isn't kind enough to proved a human parsable entry in /proc to let you know which instance of nfsd is actually holding a given file (and since each nfsd process doesn't map 1:1 to a particular nfs export that wouldn't help even if they did) there's no way to know which instance you can kill to get your lock back.

The only thing to do is shut down all of nfs-kernel-server and kick the 99% of your users who aren't causing problems.

Possibly we'd be better served with a user space NFS server, but they all seem to have their own problems.

Well, I agree in theory but...

Assuming you're using Linux at some point you will come across those words that make even the most hardened systems/storage admin tremble.

nfs-kernel-server.

I swear to fucking god they designed that thing just to mess with us. Anyone recognise this?

You need to delete this directory because $USER doesn't work here any more.

# umount /pool/home/$USER

umount: /pool/home/$USER: device is busy.

(In some cases useful info about processes that use

the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1))

cannot unmount '/pool/home/$USER': umount failed

Wait... mounted? No they bloody don't. $USER has had their account deactivated. They've left the building. Their machine has been returned to the pool. No one other than the IT team could have mounted their share anyway - what gives?

Oh, wait, they turned the machine off at the wall didn't they. Well, now we're screwed, becuase nfs-fucking-kernel-server is going to sit there and await an unmount from the client and the only way to stop it is to restart the daemon - kicking everyone who actually IS using it.

(Honestly tho - if anyone has any ideas how the HELL you kick a user from a Linux NFS server in order to cause the kernel to release its lock on an exported filesystem, this is a bane-of-my-life type problem)

Adobe...sigh...issues critical patch...sigh...for Flash Player zero day

Re: Why....

Stupid bloody "Web apps" that use it for the UI in my case. I'd love to get rid, but there's no way I can retire it as long as these things exist and we have to use them.

Investigatory Powers Bill: As supported by world's most controlling men

Re: So all political parties are for it

Sadly, not voting is NOT voting no!

This is the biggest problem in modern politics. I despise practically every "representative" that I've been offered for the last 3 parliaments. I don't trust any of them. I don't believe any of them will represent my interests in any way.

Not voting at all however achieves exactly the same, no representation. It's a nasty vicious circle. Short of running for office myself - something I consider myself entirely unfit to do - I have no idea where you even start to find a candidate that's worth the time of day.