Posts by pogul 51 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Sep 2014
Is this related to the BSOD I got several times a couple of days ago... The error was something like BAD_POOL_DATA. Googling suggests it might have been BAD_POOL_HEADER which seems to be RAM related, so I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm just grasping at straws with the word Pool being present.
At least Microsoft have added a smiley face to the BSOD. Much nicer.
> If you used the thrid party engine oil, and the car stopped working, who would you sue?
If the car manufacturer issued a software update (and cars do of course have many many microcontrollers in them these days) and that stopped the third party oil from being allowed (perhaps the car refuses to start) and that had worked fine before, then I would be absolutely livid and sue the car manufacturer.
"Everything is a file" *might possibly* be an abstraction too far, though I'm a Unix fan in general.
The filesystem though... are you serious? It's possibly the simplest abstraction I can imagine for organising data. You have leaf nodes (files) and ways of grouping files (directories). A simple graph.
I had a boss who thought he was very forward thinking and clever by suggesting the department wiki should be all about search - none of this old fashioned file/folder business. So what happens? Chaos - stuff went in, but it was basically a black hole.
When amazon came up with the genius of S3 (everything goes in a bucket), wasn't one of the first things that happened was being forced to create a fake file/folder system over the top?
If anything, we need a richer abstraction - versioning and tagging on the standard system calls perhaps.
Oh dear,
Every time Java is mentioned on the register, we see the same old, same old comments by people showing that their knowledge of what Java is, and is used for, is stuck in the mid-90s.
Java != Flash
Java != Applets
We're talking about a high-performance VM that is almost exclusively used on the server and smart-cards. It is not used on the browser (the amount of usage is gets there is statistical noise) and HTML5 is, in all practical terms, nothing to do with a replacement for Java.
How can we end this myth!
> The big advantage of the increased cadence means you don't have to wait for a big-bang release if you *need* a new feature
True, but it's not like you get to pick just that feature - you get all or nothing, so if people are rushing out half-baked "features" (because, errr, marketing) then you'll get them too, bugs and all.
Except Apple isn't "reselling" - a term which implies that the service is just rebadged as-is. I don't think they're just pointing you at AWS endpoints directly are they? What about all the accounts infrastructure and software for example? Half the internet runs on AWS, so when your online shopping data hits the servers is that too deemed as "just reselling AWS"?
Would you sue a cafe for not stating in big letters that it didn't farm all of it's own ingredients? "What? you didn't extract this salt from the sea yourself!?!"
So BT provide the scammers with the ability to call you from a spoofed phone number, then sell you kit to block it!? I feel like the phone system has barely changed in decades and it's about time they addressed the root cause of things like this. Does the phone just send the number it would like to appear at the caller display?
Just be careful... I ported my phone over to a VoIP provider and asked Virgin to cancel my phone line - based on the bill breakdown they provided each month, this should have saved me a substantial amount of money each month.
My bill went up.
Virgin explained this is because it was in a bundle price - strange that the bill breakdown didn't show it that way at all - and that it was cheaper if I got phone too. I ended up pursuading them to give me internet only at a reasonably sensible price (the new customer price) but only after a fight.
All this came after an enormous argument to get them to lay the cable under our drive way in the conduit I'd got builders to install.
I've never understood why these electronic signs don't have a separate channel (of some sort) for signage vs admin. Surely there aren't that many lights in the grid, so presumably you don't need an nvidia card to drive that, so much as a simple controller connected via serial port or whatever.
My experiences in the UK with Tom Tom have been overwhelmingly positive. I prefer it to google maps - which often seems to tell me to leave a roundabout just AFTER I've done it, for example. The ETA predictions from Tom Tom always seem to be accurate and when I've been in a convoy with other cars that "know better" they always seem to arrive about 20 minutes later.
> will happily execute as a script based on permissions
Yes, exactly - it has to be GRANTED PERMISSION to execute, rather than being able to execute based on whatever name someone has decided to give it. You know, the clue is in the word "permissions" - metadata hat describes security related information. A description, title, name or whatever is the wrong place to put this.
> People might not realise but www.domain.com and domain.com are two completely different fucking addresses. I though google hired people who had more than 1 brain cell.
Jesus, next you'll be suggesting that "Flat 1, 16 ExampleRoad" is different from "Flat 2, 16 Example Road" -- people don't want to be bothered with this sort of superfluous detail.
> I’m a bit mistified, unless someone sells a safe that hides in a mains socket?
I remember seeing exactly such a thing in the "Innovations" catalogue that used to come with the news paper or the Radio Times or whatever it was. The earth pin was the key hole if I remember correctly. I guess you wouldn't want to encourage people to stick keys into the other two pin holes?
> Our company has temporarily suspended all but essential new system purchases until fixed silicon is available or we switch to AMD or we figure out what the performance hit is.
Except, AMD and ARM designs are affected too -- which everyone seems to be ignoring. The initial reports that broke in the media said AMD and others were unaffected: this is not the case, as has been widely publicised.
I can't help wondering (as I haven't dug deeply into the speculative code execution thing) - is this flaw inherent in this architecture or did certain companies reverse engineer another company's implementation?
Oh yawn! I'm getting really bored of stuff getting judged based on the technical spec sheet. Firstly, as to the price. I get my Macbook Pro from work, as many do — the price in insignificant next to my pay and conditions :-) Builders for example will often have a much more expensive set of tools than I do. Secondly, the specs. The specs don't tell you what a joy to use the trackpad is, compared to any Wintel laptop I've used. The specs don't tell you how well Timemachine works for backups and restore. The specs don't tell you... well perhaps you get the idea. It's not like it's a 486 with 2MB of RAM, that would be rip off. No, it's a modern machine with a decent OS that works very nicely. I'm also a big fan of Linux and I believe Windows has its positives too, but judging everything by the individual parts (and quantity of them) is not a recipe for getting a good machine (oh look, this Dell has a fingerprint reader!!! and its got some extra Megahertz!)
>Just curious, what's the alternative?
>...and don't say linux because we all know that's not going to happen.
Linux.
Are you one of those people who says shit in meetings like "well it would be nice to do stuff that way, but that's not the way we do it".
So what you are saying is, tell me the answer but I'm going to disregard the answer if it is the one I don't want you to give, yet think would actually solve the problem.
What on earth are you talking about? You don't have to use gmail - there's plenty of other webmail out there, both paid for and "free". I personally have started paying for email again, because I want to be the *customer*. I use Fastmail and love the webmail interface, the IMAP implementation is great etc. etc. I've also deleted my Facebook account this week and started using DuckDuckGo instead of Google search. Yes, I know my tinfoil hat seems odd to some, but I have to say, I'm feeling much happier for it.
What I see with people using tablets and phones with flat interfaces is people swiping and poking at everything to discover what does what. On a small(ish) touch screen this makes sense as there isn't much screen real-estate to have 3D borders etc. On a laptop/desktop however, having 3D controls allows you to see exactly what is or what is not a clickable button without having to flaming well click on it.
"Because a bunch of social inept 20 somethings who don't get out enough and frankly need to get laid" -- wow, that's seems a bit unnecessary.
I don't know what the product managers (and management in general) are like at the place you work at, but where I work the people who get to make these sorts of decisions are my age (40+). I don't think this is something you can blame on the younger generation. We make software, NOT kettles by the way!
"Boot sector viruses infect systems when you, you know, boot from the infected device. Examining the contents of a drive is one thing, booting from it is quite another."
Strange, I thought that MBR viruses could spread just by listing the contents of the disk on MS-DOS (I assumed DOS did something weird like executing the MBR when you mount the disk), maybe my memory is incorrect. I certainly remember getting an MBR virus or two when I was young and foolish and not being quite sure how I caught them!
Please don't stop make remotes!
- My phone is code-locked... (1) I sit down to watch a good programme, (2) 5 mins in, a child starts screaming as they've just puked everywhere, (3) Before I can run upstairs, I have to unlock my phone, find the netflix app, let it re-sync with the programme being played, press pause. It all takes a few seconds and is annoying and fiddly. With my FireTV I just reach for the remote and press pause (and I don't have to look at it as I can feel the buttons!)
- Visitors: e.g. babysitters - what do I do then? Ask them to install a set of apps on their phone to use the TV? Or, I have to give them my Netflix credentials for them to use their phone to cast programmes to the TV?
- Kids: similar problems as for visitors really. I'm not leaving them with my phone to use, no thanks.
>I could never get into KDE myself and I never understood why Linux couldn't settle on one desktop and only a few distros (250+ distros is sheer lunacy).
You might as well say "I like Fairy liquid, so why doesn't everyone use that, why so many brands?" or "I don't like Ecover, so no one should use that".
There is no Linux - at least not in the sense that you're getting at. People will create software that suits them, hence the many differing window manager, distros etc. For there to be one definitive Linux distro we'd need some sort of bizarre legislation making all other distros illegal - please, let's not.
I got a call from the scammers, they had my name, address, account number etc. When I talked to TalkTalk I was told that I have nothing to worry about and that nothing important had been leaked/stolen. I beg to differ. As a company they are simply failing to either understand or acknowledge how serious this is.
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