Posts by rcxb 932 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
The problem with copyright is that I can take you code, change all the variable names by one letter and I have created a new work.
Completely untrue. That would be a "derivative work". In fact you could change every single line of code, and it would still fall under copyright.
https://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_works.en.htm
Irrelevant as those people do not count any more than people who do not buy gas from gas station.
Bollocks. People with petrol cars can't fill-up at home. Service stations will just simply go away.
Refuelling your vehicle away from home will happen in the parking spaces at restaurants and shops, as electricity isn't as dangerous or need expensive, special equipment.
But mostly it'll happen at home, overnight, while you otherwise would be using almost no electricity otherwise, so there may be no need to upgrade the electric infrastructure at all in many areas.
How many billions to upgrade the grid? When? And who pays?
Strangely enough, your electric utility company isn't going to give away the energy to charge your car for free. Those who need the power, are the ones who will pay for it. The extra fees will give the utilities the money to upgrade their infrastructure as long as it's a fairly gradual process. What's more, EVs have excellent usage patterns... i.e. that 4000KWH they consume is mostly going to be late at night while you're sleeping any your home would otherwise be using hardly any power, so often there isn't a need to upgrade the infrastructure, it just gets fully utilized around the clock rather than all during peak hours.
Most people will charge (slowly) at home the vast majority of the time. That includes most of the people at a service station, who will wait until they get home to pay a lower rate for their charge.
Even if you put charging stations at every parking space, they don't have to ALL run simultaneously. Cars will charge in 10 minutes while people remain parked for 30+ minutes while eating, shopping. Some spaces will be empty. It may be less than 10% of the spaces charging at any time. To deal with congestion, just have some monitoring and a count-down timer showing your car will start charging after a bit.
Electric utilities will be happy to supply as much power capacity as you are willing to pay for... You might discover a new metal cabinet on your property that hums and stays rather warm, but there's no major technical hurdle there. Since the service station will make a profit on each car being charged, everyone should be perfectly happy with the arrangement.
My company is phasing out desktops and replacing them with laptops+monitor combos.
Some companies have done that for decades now. If your employees need that mobility, you do whatever you have to. But it's more expensive than desktops, lower performance, more noise, and much worse ergonomics all-around... The best laptops have worse keyboards than the worst desktop. And a trackpad or touch-screen is simply no competition for a mouse (or trackball). If you're going with laptops docked to a monitor and keyboard/moise, you migh as well do mini-PCs which employees can take home with them... unless they really need the airport/coffee-shop level of portable operation of a laptop.
Good for AMD, and good for TSMC. Not so good for GlobalFoundries (formerly: AMD), which should be a concern. As much as I'd like to hate on Intel for being an anti-competitive monopoly, at least they still do domestic manufacturing, and haven't moved their fabs to Asia where labor is cheapest.
the TTL of .amazonaws.com domains is in the order of a few seconds
You can override the minimum TTL in many DNS servers. A few will continue to serve up expired data from the cache if it can't reach the live server, or will cache everything to disk where you could do lookups or rig up a local authority to serve it up until things get resolved.
Why transfer instead of license?
Because it's still some little guy who will be responsible for pursuing the lawsuits against any and all infringers, which could be a mega-corp with deep pockets. If he ever opts not to bother, those who licensed the patent are at quite a disadvantage to those who stole it.
I don't think the patent system protects lone inventors anyway.
Which is a rather good reason to SELL your patents to a big mega-corp (like SoftBank) for a pile of cash up-front. Of course if they can't use it, they won't be willing to spend a dollar to buy it.
Of course if they're abusing the court system, that's another matter entirely, and should be pursued irrelevant of the patents they own.
It should be pretty easy to show that a) you had a meeting with the investors/customers, b) they signed an NDA (you did have them sign an NDA, right?), and c) that they are now producing your product. That's a straight up case for patent protection
What are you talking about? Patents are the polar opposite of NDAs (trade secrets). People can implement your patented technologies even if you've never had a meeting with them.
If I were in Assange's shoes, I'd rather have Obama than Trump holding the power of pardon over me.
WikiLeaks helped Trump get elected. Trump is a rather shameless and unrepentant about his chronyism, and willing to throw his own government's interest under the bus for any reason at all. Depending on how far gone Assange is, he might have an easy road to a presidential pardon.
Some people will not survive to get a day of retirement. Others will live longer than they ever expected. That's just a fact of life.
Being the big boss is different than being an employee. Private jets, lots of vacation, setting your own schedule. He might have had quite a nice life while working, rather than just muddling through until retirement.
If you're lucky enough to get a job you can enjoy doing while earning money, great! Hang onto it. If not, while its' tempting to say your personal life and enjoyment is more important, you'll find very little enjoyment when you haven't got enough money for the necessities. And even if you can squeeze by though your early years, you'll find yourself not accumulating the reserves you'll need, or at least find very useful to have, later.
Is it any surprise that DuckDuckGo remains a tiny upstart when Google, Bing and Yahoo are paying millions of dollars to any company that will set their search engine as the default in their products? Bing and Google even have TV ads for their products (Chrome, Android, Windows, etc) which have their search engines set as defaults. How can an upstart really hope to compete with that?
With DDG I get frustrated trying to reach the info I need. With google it's usually done in moments.
I find the opposite about 95% of the time. DDG's instant answers are often helpful, DDG does a far better job of filtering out spam/linkfarm/gateway sites that litter Google search results, and I've often found myself quickly finding good answers with DDG while colleagues spend days on Google in frustration.
And on those occasions where I'm not finding what I want on DDG, just adding "!g" to the search will send you on over to Google... Most of the time, I find it was I that was wrong and Google's results are no better.
Are systems these days so overly complex they have no mechanism to suspend themselves "safely"?
It's a single check-mark to get consistent data from the entire VM with only a fraction of a second of slowdown during a snapshot, rather than having to do all kinds of application-specific commands to ensure they're all good.
The alternative (and I would think a passable workaround) is to just snapshot the VM's memory as well, so it comes back up and running in exactly the same state, with all that dirty data still in memory.
Most of us don't have the luxury of unlimited resources including capital and labor to make the transition.
Amazon had a major PR motive in eating their own dog-food, and quickly. If you just wanted to get off of Oracle quickly, you can do a more modest conversion to EnterpriseDB, with its Oracle PL/SQL compatibility layer (on top of PostgreSQL).
Most programs just use some standard database connector library that can easily be swapped out from Oracle to PostgreSQL in a few lines of code in one spot, and a parallel database dump from one and import into the other.
We can't find the skills to have people run open source databases and AWS "services" and if we do we certainly can't keep them.
Oracle databases don't just run themselves... They need 100X more expertise, optimization, care and feeding than user-firendly open-source databases like PostgreSQL or MySQL/MariaDB. I know this from years of miserable experience with some big ones... No doubt you can find a consultant to setup and maintain your open source database product for a fraction the cost of your oracle license fees, not to mention your oracle consultant's fees.
Amazon has a history of taking the long view about ROI, but for the rest of us, cost-of-change is a very big consideration.
Amazon had a major PR motive in eating their own dog-food, and quickly. If you just wanted to get off of Oracle quickly, you can do a more modest conversion to EnterpriseDB, with its Oracle PL/SQL compatibility layer (on top of PostgreSQL).
How do you... do anything online? It seems like every website requires JS these days.
Practically every site USES javascript, but that doesn't mean they NEED it. Many work without it. Those who try to force you to use javascript can often be fixed just by disabling meta-refresh or similar.
Search engine bots from Google and the like do NOT interpret javascript, so if you want to show up anywhere in search results, you need your site content to be in plain HTML on the page for them to index.
That's just dogma. There's nothing about "new" and updated that makes it more secure. Look at old djbdns or similar for software that hasn't been found vulnerable after many years.
Without javascript, plugins, and all those features, there's much less to have vulnerabilities in a browser. With such a tiny code base, it's easier to be secure and fewer places for vulnerabilities to hide.
2015 is just the last "stable release". Development is ongoing (slowly). Some projects just don't care about "releases" that much, and their userbase is sophisticated enough to grab svn/git snapshots directly. Some projects have good development practices so that the dev snapshots are only rarely broken.
Don't like it? Do it yourself.
I suggest that most purposes eg. El Reg login, an 8 character password is sufficient, provided it is based on an uncommon pattern involving mixed alphanumeric and symbol characters
So... P@55w0rd!
You're just so much better off with a nice long passphrase. Four random words, slightly randomized variations of their spelling, capitalization, spacing, etc., and you're extremely secure, with no more effort than memorizing a super complex string of random characters. The only valid excuse I've seen for short passwords is cumbersome input devices on phones and the like.
The Reg statement is correct...
Modern, salted passwords prevent the use of rainbow tables, but those weren't used here. It was brute-forced.
Modern hash algs use more CPU time, but only by a factor of 3X or so.
Meanwhile, each character added to lengthen your password *exponentially* increases the time needed to brute-force it, as long as it is actually a random selection and not a predictable variant.
Change the layout so you place the most vulnerable bits very close to the center of the mass. Odds are the particles will hit something else, first...
It may also be possible to just periodically re-flash firmware on the SSDs, if bit-swaps in those chips are the source of the failures.
While NASA was trying out 100% commercial, off-the-shelf hardware, one component needing slight customization would likely still be a rousing success. Whether that's a weird custom case layout, or custom-built SSDs with duplicate ROM chips on their controller boards.
Or perhaps they'll just give NVDIMMs and other enterprise storage tech a try, now that they know storage is going to be the weakest link.
It's not great business to be in competition with your largest customers.
Competition in the spinning HDD space is down to nothing... WD has almost 1/3rd of the market while Seagate, Toshiba and Samsung share a bit more than 1/3rd.
SSDs bring a bit more diversity, but less in the enterprise side of things, and WD is doing a good job buying up their competitors in that space, too.
It looked like a duck, walked like a duck and quacked like a duck
But if it's a doctor, engineer, architect, fishermen or hair stylist, it's still not a duck. Make sense to everyone?
Don't include all the loopholes in the laws in the first place, and you won't be constantly going back and closing them when their abuses become high profile.
and the articles I am interested in (space and science, essentially) are generally up to par now.
Check out Fractal_Antennas ... There's been a decade-long concerted effort by Nathan Cohen and his company (Fractal Antenna Systems) to pervert the article to hide any negative information on the technology or the company, take full credit for the invention, and hide all references to their big European competitor Fractus and their credible claim to its invention. Reports to admins have accomplished nothing. GeoIP the addresses of anonymous editors, and you'll find they almost all come from the city his company originates from. Some of that is on the Talk page, but you really have to look through years of edit history.
When you have one dedicated and interested editor on any but the highest profile articles, you can subvert it to say anything you want. Without a substantial policy change, Wikipedia is doomed.
Even obscenely expensive networking gear can't come close to the speeds of good NVMe drives, let alone an array of several of them. You might get a few sales with the NVMe buzzword, but your gear is going to have glacial performance compared to internal NVMe drives. Like sticking a race car in city traffic. Of course you don't care what the article says, you're just here to spam us.
If it can be proven that they were personally aware (or made aware) and still declined to take action there should be fines and possibly jail time.
That's been the downfall of many laws. It's extremely difficult, bordering on impossible to prove someone was aware of something.
No matter how many e-mails, it's easy to say they didn't see them, or (if they replied) skipped over the important parts. It's trivial to insist that verbal conversations never happened, or your recollection of the discussion was very different than the dozens of other witnesses'.
That's why lawyers make so much money. So many laws can be weaselled out of, with sufficient effort and lack of scruples.
It's easy to blame the IT staff, but more often the fault is at the top. When company heads don't see the value in their IT dept, they don't hire enough bodies to do more than just respond constant business-stopping emergencies. Or they may offer the bare minimum salary, and only get kids with no experience and minimal knowledge, so the company ends up getting the mess they deserve.
running a hypervisor on the system
Fair enough, I didn't make it quite that far through the wall of text.
I would hope that it would prevent any client OS running on it from accessing the base hardware? They also mentioned the lack of tools for Vsphere so they have looked into it.
VMWare/ESXi has a "management console" that is basically a Linux VM but with privledged access. On the management console, you can run ipmi configuration utilities. Here's a fellow who shows how to do so with SuperMicro specifically:
https://www.cryptomonkeys.com/2016/12/supermicro-ipmi-reset/
the IPMI went offline at that point and I didn't have connectivity to it again for another couple of years (next time I went on site
Wait... WHAT?
From within the OS of a running system you can access the attached BMC/IPMI to change the network settings, reboot it, etc. Whatever you need to do.
despite the fact that he knew it should have been telling him to hold the wheel and that he knew he should be holding the wheel,
He was saying this in retrospect, perhaps prompted by questions from investigators specifically asking if the lights were flashing and bells ringing.
He could just as well have believed it just didn't need his help on that day, on that road, until after the crash.
Not that I'm saying he's not responsible for the accident. You have a responsibility when handling a deadly weapon to know, and not guess or assume, what it's capabilities and limits are.
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