Posts by Spanky_McPherson

Ofcom refuses to bite over Openreach's fiber freebies

Re: Discounted for first 2 years

Wholeheartedly agree. Every provider seems to be doing this. Just cancelled my Vodafone-on-cityfibre 900 megabit service because of their pricing games, went from approx £30 to £40 at end of contract (and even that is allegedly a special deal, the undiscounted price is £60-somthing). And no doubt my new provider will pull the same trick in 18 months.

And their stupid in-contract price rises of £3 per year - so 10 percent! Just give me the same price that new customers get, raise it by inflation every year, and I'll be your customer forever!

Ofcom should ban time-limited discounts, the whole point of which is to rinse customers too busy to notice the price increase.

Linux is about to lose a feature – over a personality clash

Re: An unfortunate turn of events

Well the one example you think you found (https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/9/29/520) - that was a bug in bcachefs itself - certainly not anything broken in "stable"

Re: Why no love for XFS?

Why no love for XFS? Compared to bcachefs:

Snapshots, checksums, compression, encryption, raid, dedicated cache devices.

Re: An unfortunate turn of events

As far as I'm aware this is untrue. Can you back this up? (Not the abrasive part, that goes without saying).

I have followed this saga from the start and I don't recall Overstreet breaking anything in "stable" (whatever that means). Sure, bcachefs itself has been broken but nobody claims that to be stable yet.

If this had actually happened I can only imagine the kinds of things that would have been posted on the mailing lists.

Re: Justice for bcachefs!

Well, checksums are one useful feature. How do you know that your ext4 filesystem isn't corrupted (due to faulty disks, cables, cosmic rays, whatever?). Short answer - you have no idea whether the data you read back is the data you wrote.

Zfs, btrfs, bcachefs will guarantee to give you back the same data - or tell you that you need to restore from backup. If you put 2 disks in your machine, these filesystems can not only detect corruption, but fix the bad copy. Of course, zfs has the wrong license, and btrfs will eat your data (facebook engineers apparently disagree with this).

What if you have a fast SSD and a slow HDD? Bcachefs will direct all your writes to the fast disk, and copy to the slow disk in the background. What if you need more space? Put a new disk in and run a command to expand the filesystem.

You can take a snapshot of the filesystem at any point, keeping a history of changes. For example, you might take a snapshot before a system update, that can be rolled back instantly if there are any problems.

Ext4 still wins in performance and stability - for now. But giving up a bit of performance for checksums, snapshots, etc is worth it for me at least.

Justice for bcachefs!

This is such a shame. Bcachefs is the most important filesystem development in linux in the last 2 decades.

Some of the abuse directed to Overstreet on public mailing lists has been shocking. The kernel developers responsible should be ashamed.

(FWIW, I also lost a btrfs filesystem which imploded, not after a power loss, but after running out of disk space.)

.NET 10 preview out now, likely to be near feature-complete

Obscenely large? I've written switch statements longer than that.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

> where do you put your heat pipes?

Could they not be attached to an external wall, like people do today with air con units?

Agree we will never meet the 2050 deadline though.

Well, duh

It should be obvious to all that hydrogen-based heating is (edge cases aside) uneconomical.

We're really going to take our renewable electricity, turn it into hydrogen, then set fire to it, giving you maybe half of the original energy back as heat? Or we could, you know, run a heatpump which returns *3 times* the orignal energy as heat.

Yes, we need fatter pipes and larger radiators, and somewhere outside for the gubbins to live. The fact that new houses today are still being installed with microbore pipes that cannot be used by heatpumps should be a scandal.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Expensive

Unless you're generating your own electric, you might need to redo that calculation. At 60W continuous, you're using 525kWh per year. if you're paying £10/year it means your electricity must be about 2p / kWh.

My electric bill for that "low powered" server would be *fifteen* times higher, some £150/year.

Preview 9 of Visual Studio for Mac is out as GA approaches

Not really for C++ programmers.

Visual Studio for Mac is the evolution of the original Xamarin Studio, which was very much a C# IDE rather an a C++ IDE.

If you're a Windows C++ programmer, no need to go anywhere near this.

Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error

Re: There should only be Retry and Fail, the other two aren't needed

I'm sure Dave Plummer and the MS-DOS developers had good reasons for doing what they did.

It's a little condescending to just show up and claim that you know better than them.

I also used to have the "Everything that I don't understand is easy" attitude, but we should try to be better than that.

Come glide with me: Virgin Galactic gives Unity some fresh air, looks forward to rocket-powered flight

Re: Arianespace - long term plan?

The Arianespace Vega, which can carry 1400kg, costs $37million per launch according to Wikipedia.

The Electron can carry 200kg and costs only $6 million.

For small payloads, SpaceX is definitely not the cheapest option.

BT Openreach prepares to declare UK MBORCed* as all new phone line installations halted over coronavirus

Re: I know this

For some of us, the point is to be able to work from home.

For others, it is to binge watch pirated movies over the internet... 'nuff said.

Re: I know this

Though if anyone is thinking of using a 3G hotspot to replace a broadband connection, be aware you will likely not receive a publicly routable IP address.

This will mean any application that requires you to open a port on your router won't work. For example, you won't be able to do remote streaming from your Plex server.

Oracle and Google will fight in court over Java AGAIN and this time it's going to the Supremes

People in glass houses...?

Maybe we can have a crowdsourced search for third-party APIs that Oracle has implemented^H^H^H^H^H^H stolen?

NASA Administrator upends the scorn bucket on Elon Musk's Starship spurtings

Did he say "Commercial Crew" or "SLS"

Elon's proper response in this interview - fast forward to 1m07s.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2019/09/29/elon-musk-starship-interview-orig.cnn/video/playlists/business-elon-musk/

You're on a Huawei to Hell, US Sec State Pompeo warns allies: Buy Beijing's boxes, no more intelligence for you

But why are they inspecting the source code?

I don't think it's feasible to guarantee that the binaries running on the network gear are generated from the inspected source code.

Unless you're planning to desolder all the flash chips and test them individually, who's to say what's actually running?

The OS can simply report whatever the attackers want it to, including lying about what binaries are running.

Re: If everything's encrypted, what's the problem?

Well, because knowing who is talking to each other is useful intelligence, even if you can't decrypt the actual data.

Oof, are you sure? Facing $9bn damages, Google asks Supreme Court to hear Java spat

Re: @Doug S ... Better if they refuse cert

No, its really not like that. To use your own metaphor, Google created a completely different PCB, but used the same pinout as Oracle's PCB.

Largest ever losses fail to dent Tesla's bulging order book

Re: Lose a little on each one...

Oh for goodness sake.

Tesla make a gross profit on each car. Their losses are due to capital expenditure.

Five-storey Blue Screen Of Death spotted in Thailand

"Why the petrol company decided they needed Windows on something as simple as a petrol pump I'll never know."

I think the business case for running Windows on petrol pumps involves showing ads to people who have no choice but to stand in front of them for several minutes.

Honor 8: Huawei targets millennials with high-spec cheapie. 3 words – Food pic mode

Re: already 2 checks ahead of the competition ...

@JimmyPage...

Totally agree about the shiteware that comes preinstalled on many phones these days, but just buying unlocked phones doesn't guarantee lack of shiteware. For example, the Sony Z series are great - apart from the shitty Sony apps that can't be uninstalled.

It now looks like WileyFox are going down the shiteware route - I updated mine a couple of days ago and now it won't stop spamming me about bloody Skype every time I open the dialler.

Must listen: We've found the real Bastard Operator From Hell

Possibly the best worst hold music in the world

I nearly snorted my coffee all over my keyboard. Brilliant stuff.

A perfect marriage: YOU and Ubuntu 16.04

Re: kubuntu 15.10 to 16.04 works but 12.04 to 16.04 does not

12.04 to 16.04 is not a valid upgrade path. You have to go via 14.04, I believe.

Would be nice if it didn't hang on boot

Doesn't work for me - it tells me the filesystem is clean and then hangs. Not even a login prompt.

Fortunately it was a clean install on a new drive, I can just pop the old drive back in.

I might raise a bug if I can work out where I should do it, it's not immediately obvious.

Microsoft sets date for SQL Server on Linux

Re: This is actually largely irrelevant

@Doctor Syntax

Yes, I agree with you. Most folks using a commercial database (e.g. Oracle) will continue to do so rather than move to SQL Server on Linux.

I look forward to seeing if Microsoft can make an impact on Oracle's market share. It has a chance, assuming it will be much cheaper than Oracle.

Re: This is actually largely irrelevant

"there are better free alternatives out there"

er, no.

Core database functionality of the free databases may be comparable to SQL Server, but they are nowhere near in terms of the full package.

To pick some random examples, where are the better free alternatives to SQL Server's multi-master replication? What about Analysis Services? I'm sure I could think a dozen features of SQL Server that are better than the free alternatives.

(Last time I used PostgreSQL - admittedly a long time ago, it required a database dump and restore when upgrading versions. Honestly I would still use it, but better than SQL Server? Nope.)

First working Apple Mac ransomware infects Transmission BitTorrent app downloads

How to mitigate the encryption malware?

I like the way the malware can encrypt Time Machine backups.

I am considering changing my Time Machine configuration so that it writes to a Linux box on the network rather than an external disk, and where I can take daily ZFS snapshots of it - presumably this would mitigate against this type of malware.

I believe this configuration works , but is unsupported by Apple.

But what was the original vulnerability?

The actions taken (i.e. release a new version of the affected application) only make sense if the original vulnerability in the web server has been identified and patched.

Otherwise, what's to stop this new version from getting infected in the same way?

You shouldn't use *any* software from this developer until the question is answered: what was the actual vulnerability, and how was it fixed?

A bubble? No way, we're in a bust, says rich VC living in alternate reality

Uber's technology is undeniably brilliant???

Living in the provinces, I have never used Uber. So can someone tell me what is so special about the technology?

From what I have read it seems pretty straightforward.

Backblaze beats Bezos: Backup biz boasts bettering AWS bit bucket

Looks good

At this price it is competitive with storing the data yourself on a couple of hard drives.

There doesn't seem to be much information on the redundancy/reliability though.

Malvertisers slam Forbes, Realtor with world's worst exploit kits

Adblocking is now a basic security requirement.

Sorry websites, I adblock everything. Provide a one-click method for me to pay you directly (and anonymously) for your content and I'll be happy to pay.

Note I'm talking fractions of a penny per page, not a monthly subscription.

Amazon reveals $50 Android-ish Fire tablet it will axe in two years

Re: US=$49.99, UK=£49.99

Er, no. $49.99 is very different from £49.99.

Ex-VAT, the UK price is £41.66. This is the number we are comparing. According to google that is $64.97.

So it *is* a significant rip-off.

The last post: Building your own mail server, part 1

But running a mailserver from home simply doesn't work...

My experience was the same as some other commenters - (some) outgoing emails never arrived at the destination.

I suspect that some SMTP servers would silently drop email based on the source IP address (i.e. they knew it was a residential ADSL connection)

It made the whole exercise pointless, and I ended up on gmail.

How the FLAC do I tell MP3s from lossless audio?

Re: "Everything between sample points is lost"

This sentence is fundamentally wrong. Nothing between the sample points is lost. The continuous analogue signal can be perfectly recreated from the samples.

Please please watch this excellent video made by someone more knowledgable than anyone on this forum: (watch between 4:00 and 6:00 if you don't have time to watch the whole thing)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

(For the pedants, yes, this assumes that the signal being sampled does not contain frequencies above 22.05kHz. Obviously this filtering is always done to the signal prior to sampling)