Posts by dinsdale54 152 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Oct 2015
I'm on my 5th M720. I really like the feel but they last about 2-3 years. The keyboards last about twice as long.
Recently I installed Logi options s/w for the first time as I needed to re-pair the universal receiver to the keyboard/mouse. Yes, it's possible to break the default pairing if you try hard enough.
This article is a timely reminder to remove the Logi software. A mouse is very high on the list of things that doesn't need to be internet connected.
A friend once worked for the national telecom company in a small country in Europe. He informed me that they were a bunch of crooks after they deliberately built mobile 'phone masts along the border near the autoroute so that they could generate roaming charges from everybody driving past their little country.
I think the bigger issue is that nobody cared.
Most people don't want much from a filesystem other than accessing files, directories and a few permissions.
Basing it on a full relational database is a solution looking for a problem. If your data is structured enough for that to be useful you are probably already using ...... a relational database. If you want to find a file then a find or DIR command is usually plenty.
Sounds like an academic project got out of control to me.
What's with the 'nowadays' :)
My boss 30 years ago - a good guy - had a reputation for not reading beyond the first sentence of an email. We would litter more complex emails with comments such as 'still here, boss?' "Hang in there boss" "Nearly done, boss" etc.
He wasn't unusual in that respect.
Almost certainly.
Hey $BIGCUSTOMER, how would you like to license $SHINYTHING for £30 a month per seat?
$BIGCUSTOMER: "No, what a complete waste of money"
OK, $BIGCUSTOMER, how about we drop your Windows and O365 renewal by £35 a month, include $SHINYTHING for £30 and put out a nice press release?
$BIGCUSTOMER: Done. You can even use my name in a press release!
Been there, done that. More than once.
If you aren't permanently depriving the owner of their vehicle then it's not theft which is why there's a specific offence in the UK of Taking and Driving Away/Taking Without Consent. It's almost as though the law already realises that CONSENT IS IMPORTANT.
What the AI industry is doing is the equivalent of joyriding in your car and objecting to being asked to get permission from you first.
Tell me you haven't flown on Concorde without tellimg me you haven't flown on Concorde :lol:
The seats were plenty comfortable with loads of legroom. Headroom was limited but that's wasn't a problem once you are sitting down. The wine list was rather good. I don't recall any Foie Gras or caviar but I did have a decent steak - although obviously not as good as at Peter Luger the night before.
In 1998 my ticket was ~£800 London to New York, coming back on Concorde. Demand was quite low for the early flight back hence the good deal.
A customer I used to deal with had a class A. Their chief technologist had decided in the early 90s that the internet was going to be a "big thing" and simply wrote and asked for one. It also meant that at the time I was dealing with them - late 90s - all the desktops in the company had a valid internet facing IP address!
It looks like they have sold off a lot of their space already, keeping a mere few hundred thousand addresses for their own use.
The spec is the spec.
It's what has been agreed to be delivered. If you change the spec then you are changing the contract - that doesn't usually come for free.
In the early part of my career I worked for a company that supplied systems to local government written in Oracle. The system was decently complex and did what it said on the tin. Most councils took it as is, or with a few customizations which were generally done on a T&M basis.
The couple of councils who asked for extensive customization were back using the standard system within a few years. They discovered that they weren't actually as special as they thought and the costs of maintaining a customized version outweighed any predicted benefits.
The quality of IT departments at the councils was a mixed bag. Some were pretty good while some didn't really have anybody who knew what they were doing. There were very few Oracle skills there. Somebody who actually got good at Oracle would likely be off for a better paying job pretty soon.
A company I used to work for rewrote/ported its OS from a hand-rolled kernel to BSD. There was over 15 years of development work in the original and it took over 10 years before they had feature parity in the new one. It was a fair bit smaller than Linux.
As you say it's a HUGE amount of work. If you are relying on a small number of people, some working in their spare time to do this work you had better make a pretty good case for doing it.
The legal profession is already filled with databases of existing legal cases with extensive search facilities.
The correct answer from AI should be "I don't have a fucking clue, how about you go and consult one of the existing, competent legal databases run by actual lawyers?"
It's like your overconfident bullshitting mate down the pub whose ability to make shit up was killed by the advent of google (this definitely wasn't me, of course not)
I doubt it as well.
This is why I purchased a Turris Omnia. The chunky CPU specs allow close to line speed (1gbps) routing. My previous home router couldn't handle the 250mbps connection I had at the time.
Hardly ANY reviews of home WiFi routers seem to mention the actual routing performance, just the WiFi bandwidth. A budget router may well not have the necessary CPU horsepower for faster internet connections.
Yup.
In the mid 80s a schoolmate visited Manchester - possibly UMIST - and brought back an alternative prospectus put out by the students. There was a Q&A section for one of the engineering courses and one question was :
Q: Is there any sex discrimination?
A: No, she was not discriminated against.
While learning about security is a sensible precursor to getting in to crypto, I'd start with considering the complete lack of any value to start with.
A friend is a greybeard programmer and at least 20 years older than anybody else he works with. All his team were in on crypto except him. At their last meeting he discovered that every one of them was out a decent amount of money from their 'investments' I think the smallest loss was about £8000 up to >£30,000. Somewhere somebody made money from them but the net is a large amount of energy was expended to move money from them to somebody else.
At least Charles Ponzi had a believeable story he was touting around the markets. Crypto doesn't even have that.
Gartner generally aren't wrong because they ask their customers what they plan on doing, then write a report saying 'this is what everybody wil be doing'
The people they interviewed then have an 'independent' report to support doing exactly what they were already planning on doing.
Nice work if you can get it.
I agree with some of this. He does seem to actually be trying to answer questions and isn't suffering from the intermittently faulty memory of many of the witnesses.
However on the technical side - which I guess is why most of us are here - the issue I have, and this was the same with his colleague Anne Chambers, is the clear assumption that the system was working fine and if they couldn't find a problem in the data after a cursory check then there wasn't a problem and it was somebody else's fault. To find bugs you have to actually go looking for them.
The whole culture of the PO and ICL/Fujitsu seems to have been to see everybody else as the problem when a good hard look in the mirror was needed.
Early systemd looks exactly like a copy of the Solaris SMF - which fixed a number of issues with the init system - dependencies, parallelism etc.
I recall there was discussion at Sun about whether it was too big a change to the traditional init system. Systemd took that big leap as a starting point and has spent the next 15 years trying to devour all of Unix.
I have no idea whether that was always the plan or it's just a case of feature-itis.
The issue that forced me to learn about this (referred to in another post) was a customer backing up data from Tokyo to Singapore IIRC. Plenty of bandwidth but significant packet loss.
My company ended up re-writing the data transfer protocol to use multiple tcp connectrions and making the send windows proportionally smaller. Packet loss then caused much smaller retransmits.
I see lots of comments about how Starlink is fantastic - which I agree with - but it's not what Geoff is discussing.
I've put in more time than I ever wanted to dealing with high latency jittery networks with packet loss. You can get in to all sorts of issues with large send and receive windows causing enormous retransmits at significant jitter or small amounts of packet loss. ~1% packet loss on a high latency network will pretty much remove your ability to to large data transfers, regardless of the theoretically available bandwidth.
The congestion control algorithm makes a big difference here. There are lots of them - which is a sign that none work well for all use cases. The author is making sensible suggestions as to which ones are well suited to Starlink.
A friend who did a couple of years working in Japan for a large computer manufacturer described their decision making process exactly like this. Meetings are where decisions are communicated, not made.
It does put the onus on the manager to ensure they talk to all the relevant people and listen to them but get that right and it's an efficient process.
A couple of IT projects I worked on for the military were similar. It took a while to understand the culture but it worked well - If you had a good manager.
The AES spec determined that all entrants would use a 128 bit block size and at up to at least 256 bit key size. I believe Rijndael did offer larger block sizes but once it became AES that feature was dropped.
At the time, encryption was very CPU heavy. No custom functions in mainstream CPUs like today. We sold quite a few nCipher cards to customers wanting to run VPNs and suchlike. Limited use cases for them these days.
Yes, that's generally a good policy. The time to find out whether a system restarts is not when you are trying to restart everything after a power outage.
Yes, there are likely caches in RAM which need to be rebuilt and will increase latency for a while.
Some years back I had an angry customer (investment bank) to deal with. One of our servers had crashed and taken down a trading application - despite being in a failover cluster. What the bank then discovered was that they didn't know how to restart the service - about 20 applications on a similar number of servers. The services had to be restarted in a specific order - which they didn't know since everything had been running for several years uninterrupted.
This is when I also learnt the lesson that the more somebody shouts at you, the more likely that it's their fault.
Some years back, a colleague who had just joined from another Unix server company recounted a similar story.
They were running benchmarks on the soon to be released next gen systems and up to their neck with both hardware and software issues needing to be fixed before anything would run successfully. His WTF moment happend when the CEO passed him in the corridor and said 'I hear you are getting great benchmark numbers on the new systems'
It had only taken about 3 layers of management speak for the message to completely reverse from the truth.
In my many years in presales I dealt with a - thankfully - small number of really unpleasant organisations and individuals.
I once suggested a sales incentive where the top sales rep in the company won the right to tell a customer of their choice to go fuck themselves - regardless of the financial consequences.
I have never seen such enthusiasm from the sales reps for a reward scheme!
Here's the code and the explanation of why it's moronically stupid.
This extract from EPOSSCore.dll has been written to reverse the sign of a
number and is equivalent to the command :-
d=-d
Public Function ReverseSign(d)
Ifd<o Then
d= Abs(d)
Else
d=d-(d*2)
End If
ReverseSign = d
End Function
Whoever wrote this code clearly has no understanding of elementary
mathematics or the most basic rules of programming.
Read this witness statement / watch the testimony. It's depressing.
https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/witn00620100-david-mcdonnell-witness-statement
TL;DR :
The part of the system that was core to subsequent issues was known to be a badly written POS before launch.
The guy brought in to assess the system and remedy issues wasn't allowed to rewrite it and was moved on when he complained.
The was pressure from government to launch on schedule.
You might want to check on that.
Uber have been pissing money away for years but they are now profitable.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-details/2023/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Second-Quarter-2023/default.aspx
Sadly, this profitability appears to have coincided with their service getting much worse - in London at least.
If somebody says they have a new architecture and part of the pitch is 'we can fix problem [X] in the compiler' - You should probably run rather than walk away.
At the couple of places I've worked where there was a compiler team - they were usually very cautious about what was achievable. It was the processor architects with some clever pet project who handwaved away significant problems as something for the compiler.
Or an 'error of judgement' :)
TBF this is actually largely how tax law works. If you are found liable for a tax bill, the govt just wants the money. If you pay up, you generally are in the clear (apart from little people doing their tax returns obviously)
The important bit is not to keep evading tax after being investigated, that's when they throw the book at you. See Lester Piggott / Bernie Ecclestone. In Bernie's case, it was more of a leaflet they thew at him, in exchange for another £650 million.
My main memory is that they were noisy. I flew pre refurbishment and sitting in a window seat you had to speak up to the cabin crew in the aisle. Excellent wine list! I believe the work of Jancis Robinson.
The interior was small but once sitting down it was fine. The seats were comfortable, if a little vintage looking and you were only there for a bit over 3 hours.
I was booked for a 2nd flight when they were grounded.
I also cycled to Heathrow to watch the last commercial flights land there - 3 Concordes landing one after the other. It was VERY busy on all the perimeter roads.
Oh yes, the windows got hot to the touch.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
