* Posts by jms222

298 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2016

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Portable drive, 5TB capacity. Hmm, there's something fishy here

jms222

Got out some old SCSI drives yesterday including a Seagate Barracuda of about 2GB I think. It's a noisy beast.

World-leading heart hospital 'very, very lucky' to dodge ransomware hit

jms222

Old technology called permissions

Remember those things called permissions and that you can mark things not supposed to be written as read-only ? Even on network shares.

Clearly they don't

Microsoft puts Windows Updates on a diet with 'differential downloads'

jms222

Back in XP ish times MS Updates used to cache locally if you employed an HTTP caching proxy (Squid say). So after the first machine the rest were incredibly quick..

Now with secure connections not so.

Smart Meter rollout delayed again. Cost us £11bn, eh?

jms222

They still have to do inspections every year or two sending snottograms when they can't with all manner of hollow threats.

Low-power transistors hint at alternative to battery bonfires

jms222

Software

Fix the current round of awful software (looking at you, Android) and you can sort out most power problems.

Small fry Scale offers single-node HCI boxen for the ROBO crowd

jms222

What does it actually DO ?

Sometimes I feel old.

Accountant falls for sexy Nigerian email scammer, gives her £150k he cheated out of pal

jms222

"church-going" and "professional" in the same sentence ?

Microsoft: Watch out millennials for evil Security Essentials

jms222

Earlier versions of Windows very sensibly _required_ the three fingered salute for logging in to prevent nasties getting in the way.

Aussie trams equivalent to 30 skateboarding rhinos

jms222

In Olympic-sized swimming pools in Wales in Belgium surely.

'Biggest ever' Linux release

jms222

Don't get the logic here. Isn't it sensible to LTS something stable that has had a _small_ number of commits and been tested thoroughly ? Ah yes it's Linux.

Every LTE call, text, can be intercepted, blacked out, hacker finds

jms222

I thought LTE didn't do calls at the moment.

IoT botnet swells

jms222

Ebay

It doesn't help that vendors of complete shite, not just IoT stuff can't be given bad reviews or rather Ebay make it incredibly difficult to do so (after n days but not after m days after resolution and never about the product itself).

It's about time Ebay (not so much Amazon who at least take stuff back no question) took more responsibility. Start with 18650 cells with impossible capacities. Make sellers declare original manufacturer and part number (bearing in mind these cells are typically recycled which I don't disagree with but no reason why they can't be made to declare current measured capacity and ESR) and stop new vendors popping up selling the same stuff.

Microsoft keeps schtum as more battery woes hit Surface sufferers

jms222

Macbook Pro experience

My MBPro is a 15" mid-2010 and still goes several hours on a charge.

It's had hundreds if that of cycles but still good considering Li-Ion goes so dramatically with time as much as cycles.

Probe boffins: Two balls deep in Uranus's ring

jms222

Myanus

I remember a travel programme exploring Myanus in the U.S. and finding it had a sewage works.

NHS patients must be taught to share their data, says EU lobby group

jms222

I object to having to pay tens of pounds to get copies of my data out of my local hospital when the pharmas don't. Well not that amount scaled up anyway.

It's supposedly anonymised but you don't have to get much publicly available information (for example news that somebody was involved in a road traffic accident) to connect everything up.

HPE tops in tape. Yes, tape is still a thing

jms222

So you can't your data in a jiffy

So by using tape you can't easily destroy terabytes of data in a jiffy, now even more extreme with SSD, with a poorly thought out command ?

This is bad how ?

Why OpenCAPI is a declaration of interconnect fabric war

jms222

What is all this obsession with cores ? It's even worse than the MHz thing that went before it.

Are people so F£$%^ing stupid these days they don't realise that unless you have something useful to do with them you're wasting money on many things including 1) Silicon 2) powering them 3) powering all the complicated cache-coherency logic 4) being slowed down because of interconnect complexity 5) being slowed by software locks

Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA. Repeat, Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA

jms222

Intel XScale was just DEC StrongARM re-badged and later sold to Marvell then evolved into their Sheeva/Orion/Kirkwood (v6 ish) then Armada (v8).

jms222

and Xilinx have been shipping an FPGA with POWER on it for some time. I detect hyper-marketing as usual from Intel. Zzzzzz.

RIP Samsung 'Death Note' 7

jms222

But with the Chinese, as opposed to Samsung battery they're fine and they're selling there.

The problem now is that the name is tainted.

SSDs in the enterprise: It's about more than just speed

jms222

SSDs do NOT enable de-duplication as the article states.

FreeBSD 11.0 lands, with security fixes to FreeBSD 11.0

jms222

I remember an earlier FreeBSD being delayed by a whole year because it was deemed not ready.

Compare with the Linux kernel that releases every five minutes such that many sites feel it is newsworthy and fail to maintain compatibility even with minor releases.

Don't panic, but a 'computer error' cut the brakes on a San Francisco bus this week

jms222

Steam trains have a system where the brakes are only released when suction is _present_ for obvious reasons. Clearly design new fangled stuff has forgotten has not learnt from the past.

Ofcom finds 'reasonable grounds' that KCOM failed to maintain 999 services

jms222

but it's 0118 999 881 999 119 725 3

Sudden explosion in reports of exploding phones

jms222

IT Crowd

Keep thinking of the of the "My tits are on fire" IT Crowd scene.

M.2 SSD drive format is under-rated. So why no enterprise arrays?

jms222

Perhaps if they were mounted in translucent coloured plastic blocks so you could open a panel and start pulling or swapping them while your HAL9000, errant starship computer or whatever complained.

jms222

Regardless of standards you can't hot-swap something on a PCB without risking bad stuff such as shorting things out. So definite no no for enterprise.

Oh and PLEASE sort your units out. You mean bytes not bits surely. For a publication that pushes stories on storage so frequently at least get your units right.

Crusty Cat 5e/6 cables just magically sped up to 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps

jms222

One really important thing is the ability to have 5GBps RJ45 SFP+ which will enable bridging between boxes with SFP+ ports and boxes with RJ45 ports. (10 is too power hungry for SFP.)

Lenovo: Entry-level 1U pitch

jms222

Shame it's impossible to find a price for the thing.

Samsung: And for my next trick – exploding WASHING MACHINES

jms222

Flying back to Luton Tuesday was amused at the announcement that Note 7s must be switched off

Samsung intros super-speedy consumer SSDs, 'fastest M.2s ever'

jms222

What does "prices start at" mean ? Those ARE the prices aren't they or are they for something else ?

Ubuntu tees up OpenStack on IBM's iron

jms222

Linux with IBM ?

I still can't square Linux and the millenial's open source release and break every five minutes with IBM's decades of binary compatibility.

Actually if it's POWER rather than 360 it's only a couple of decades.

Sick of Southern Rail? There's a crowdfunding site for that

jms222

SAAS

Suing As A Service

jms222

Do I want to give my hard-earned money to a bunch of overpaid legal beagles ? Now let me think about that. The answer is I do not.

VW Dieselgate engineer sings like a canary: Entire design team was in on it – not just a few bad apples, allegedly

jms222

Just get the F***ing things off the road and allow normal consumer law processes to roll.

Linus Torvalds won't apply 'sh*t-for-brains stupid patch'

jms222

It's not so much there aren't any drivers but device support either exists in the ever growing huge bloated mess of kernel (including the one that this article is about) and userland packages. Or it doesn't.

There is NO mechanism for plugging something in the the machine going to find drivers for it based on the IDs (USB or PCI) or the device. Like MS Windows does. Nor is there anything in the pipeline that does that but I will accept correction.

jms222

Is it any different to not quite distributing various other things for licensing reasons but distributing an easy way to get them (after agreeing to terms) ?

I agree re lack of stability these days. If you want any kind of stability FFS do not use Linux instead of BSDs if at all possible.

Sophos Windows users face black screens after false positive snafu

jms222

winlogon.exe is presumably signed by Microsoft so why exactly doesn't AV software respect this ?

If you haven't changed your Dropbox password for 4 years, do so now

jms222

I believe this https://xkcd.com/936/

so all my passwords are "correct horse battery staple"

Speaking in Tech: Intel joins ARMs race – even Chipzilla needs to Make All The Things

jms222

Did a bit of work on the (DEC) StrongARM back in the day and now use Marvell devices.

That's Marvell not Marvel unless you're into comics.

False Northern Lights alert issued to entire UK because of a lawnmower

jms222

I know at the antenna array in here in Cambridge they simply kept sheep in the field and only had the occasional problem with them jumping up and chomping through cables.

Fujitsu: Why we chose 64-bit ARM over SPARC for our exascale super

jms222

Haven't we forgotten about how many concurrent SIMDs the thing executes ?

Otherwise just stating the width is pointless but is rather like the modern trend of being fixated on the number of cores (which end up 99% idle for most of us).

Little ARMs pump 2,048-bit muscles in training for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale mega-brain

jms222

In other news Gillette's new razor has another blade !

Intel teases geeks with 2017 AI hyper-chip: Xeon Phi Knights Mill

jms222

Ah yes the 20+ year old P54C

£11bn later: Smart meters project delayed again for Crapita tests

jms222

Mechanical ones certainly DO run backwards even if they're not supposed to.

Friend with PV has so far avoided suppliers noticing this.

Jon

Wanna build your own drone? Intel emits Linux-powered x86 brains for DIY flying gizmos

jms222

Just need an enormous ****ing battery pack and you're good to go

Vodafone: Dear customers. We're sorry we killed your Demon

jms222

I was with CIX for a while and Demon started there in a conference called tenner_a_month.

I also did some work for Camnet also known as Cambridge Freenet. One of their people left and started Freeserve.

Air gap breached by disk drive noise

jms222

You can also get sound out of the fans, the power supply or, wait for it, the dedicated sound-producing hardware and speakers.

I have heard information can leak from the display, the various LEDs even the NETWORK INTERFACE.

Why do people fund this nonsense ?

VMware survives GPL breach case, but plaintiff promises appeal

jms222

Much GPL software is likewise pretty much a copy of what was already available under other licenses (BSD) and the "writers" just made something functionally equivalent with a different license.

Flipping heck! Virtual machines hijacked via bit-meddling Feng Shui

jms222

Anything sensible and not cheapo desktop will have ECC memory and this won't work.

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