Posts by R Soul

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

what's this vim shit?

"Getting nostalgic about VIM"

That's for PFYs. Gnarly old Unix admins like me get nostalgic over vi which predated vim by about 20 years.

I'd be more worried about who's maintaining the hardware and software.

Besides, it's usually a very bad idea to put life-and-death critical systems on any kind of network.

Re: When??

It was that fast because there was nowhere to route those OSI packets to. Dropping packets at line speed isn't hard, even for an OSI router.

The protocol wars were over years ago. What we are doing now is cleaning up the battlefield of any leftover debris.

Sadly, too much of that debris is still festering away and often mutating into new types zombies that are hard to kill off.

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And we also want EV's?

Consider that an insurance policy for when your home generators break.

Re: We all know why

"I have heard of DC outskirt commutes where from the highway you can see your destination and probably walk there in 10 minutes"

Have you ever tried walking for 10 minutes in the DC area in the humidity and 30C+ heat of summer or the -5-10C and 50cm+ of snow in winter? Besides, walking in the USA is a commie plot to bankrupt the oil and car companies.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

Re: Quite apart from online...

"Frightening when they end up on relying on their version of 'common sense' rather than be able to take account of the expert evidence."

Sometimes that can be a good thing. Expert evidence isn't always truthful or correct.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Re: Quick charging

"EU driver safety rules require 45 minutes unbroken rest time"

I thought we had left the EU, Brexit was done and we'd got rid of all the red tape and regulations from those pesky Brussels bureaucrats.

Apple to pay $50m settlement for rotten butterfly keyboards

Re: Talk about pattern and practice..

"When a device has a defect, Apple first goes through denial, then a period of withdrawal where they avoid talking about it, perhaps followed by a bit of victim blaming, then acknowledge it grudgingly but say it only impacts a handful of devices, then as the howls mount, admit it actually is bad enough they have to do something about it"

Remarkably similar to the Kubler-Ross model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Maybe that explains why so much shit comes out her mouth.

Re: I'm surprised

Johnson big majority - Brexit completed.

Boris has just said he wants his successor to finish the job on Brexit. Which means it isn't completed.

Re: Lets hope it

"Fraudulent advertising will need to be tackled"

Is there any other kind of advertising?

Re: The British Internet....

Nadine Dorries thinks???!!! Are you sure ?

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Shouldn't that be "no matter what MS says, most people will notice it hasn't changed"?

"Everyone is so complaining and in the same time cannot live without Office or Teams. "

You're speaking for yourself. I've been doing IT for over 40 years and got along just fine without using anything from Microsoft*. Ever. Or IBM.

* This has had the added benefit of never getting asked to fix Microsoft Shit for colleagues, family, friends, neighbours, etc.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

The stupidest deal of the century... so far

I hope these two zillionaire toddlers go to court - and both of them lose.

Spending gazillions on the court case would be a bonus, except of course for all that dosh going to lawyers.

UK response to China's tech ambitions labelled 'incoherent and muted'

Re: Two possibilities

When you can't argue the facts, attack the messenger.

Union tells BT: Commit to pay rise talks next week or else

Re: CPI + 3.9%

The workers are getting offered fuck all and the execs are getting >> CPI. As usual.

BT's Chief Exec got a 30%+ rise this year, trousering ~£3M/year.

Boris Johnson set to step down with tech legacy in tatters

Re: Direct your ire...

"maybe even a lot of government IT procurements do actually succeed and work"

Name one. Just one.

Re: Direct your ire...

No fucking chance. It'll take at least 30-50 years to get a more competent administration. That's how long is needed to get clueful people with a STEM background into the top jobs in government and politics. If they eve do. Just look at that today. Almost all the MPs, senior civil servants, and policy wonks come from the B ark of lawyers, PPE students, arts graduates, classics scholars and similar pond life.

Hoping for more government competence is fine. But the signs point in the other direction. The wildly useless and stupid Priti Vacant, Mad Nad and JRM are still in post despite their protector's resignation.

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

Re: Vassal State

You bastard! I'm going to have that image seared in my brain for years.

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Re: Racist, Sexist, and Antisemitic

Are these cromulent words?

The bleedin' obvious

WTF? You can get research grants to find out people say rude and offensive things on the Internet! What will these researchers do next, get money to find out water is wet or it gets dark at night? Research into what bears do in the woods is probably beyond them.

Returning to the Moon on the European Service Module

Good luck with that now Shagger Boris's clown cabinet is bringing back the bushel and troy ounce. We've taken back control y'see.

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: Manager and Cashier

OK, I'll take one for the team. Let me do a runner with £1M+ and find out how fr it goes.

Halfords suffers a puncture in the customer details department

Re: Wassat, then?

That sets a remarkably low bar. The wetware at Hellfords is the stuff that couldn't get a job at PissyWorld or Talk Talk.

Re: Is this the same Halford....

Surely Alfas rust away long before an oil change is necessarty?.

Re: Is this the same Halford....

Three times now I've been screwed out of a £5 voucher after buying oil from them.

After they screwed you out of the voucher the first time, why did you try again? And again?

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Even stranger units. What's 6.5x1x1 metres in Wales's?

Record players make comeback with Ikea, others pitching tricked-out turntables

Re: It gets more fun...

"Weird, I thought hifi was meant to reproduce the original source as faithfully as possible, not alter it to suit your tastes."

These are not mutually exclusive.

Farewell to two pivotal figures: The founder of Inmos, and the co-creator of MIME

Re: Not quite true.....

WTF? Are you saying there are lies on Wikipedia? What is the world coming to?

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: What about the range gluttons?

Some government and corporate enterprises have whole blocks of ip numbers for their personal business use. Whilst useful to them perhaps its time to get the vast amount of unused numbers freed up by requiring evidence of need.

Most of those blocks were handed out long before the policy of needs-based address allocations or the RIRs existed. So it's not possible to forcibly reclaim unused addresses from them. There's no legal basis for that action. Assuming there was an IPv4 address police. Which there isn't.

These "legacy" IP addresses are already being freed up and recycled. For example, the UK government started selling off unused chunks of DWP's 51/8 in 2015: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32826353. Microsoft bought Nortel's address space after the company went bust in 2011.

Further tinkering with IPv4 address allocations is too silly for words. If all of the IPv4 space was available and could be perfectly distributed/utilised, it would not be enough. ~4 billion addresses is too small for a planet with 7-8 billion people. Trying to get closer to 100% utilisation of IPv4 is pointless. There just aren't enough v4 addresses to go round.

Re: Somebody's talking bollocks

Oops! I misread 240/4 as 240/8 - so shoot me.

240/4 means 16 /8s, not one. So at previous depletion rates, if that address space was available - and it can't be for legacy reasons - 240/4 would last until around the end of next year. At which point we're back where we are today: no more IPv4 and a need to deploy IPv6.

Somebody's talking bollocks

The article says "a new initiative has been proposed that could free up hundreds of millions of addresses that are currently unused". But it only mentions 3 /8s. Which can't easily be brought into use. 3 /8s is ~48M IPv4 addresses. Which is quite a lot less than hundreds of millions.

BTW if there were hundreds of millions of IPv4 addresses going spare, somebody would have figured out how to distribute them by now. They haven't. That's because there's next to no IPv4 space left to allocate. It's almost all gone.

far beyond stupid

This idea is bat-shit crazy.

There's an unknown but significant installed base that cannot properly handle these "special" /8s. There's next to no chance of fixing those elderly and unsupported/unmaintained protocol stacks.

Even if these backwards compatibility issues could be addressed (excuse the pun), freeing up those three /8s will be an utter waste of time. In the last 3-4 years of IPv4 distribution, the Internet went through 1 /8 of v4 every month or theresabouts. If these three /8s could be made available now - how? - they'd be used up by September. And probably a lot sooner than because the address brokers and speculators will surely snaffle them up.

Stop fucking about with the dregs of IPv4. There's no point. Any effort wasted on that is better spent getting IPv6 deployed.

IBM ends funding for employee retirement clubs

Is there a difference?

I thought the whole of IBM was a retirement club.

Beware the fury of a database developer torn from tables and SQL

Re: Voice prompts

"I produced a system many years ago to measue the pH of cat urine"

Beats working for TalkTalk. Or Vermin Media or BT or Crapita of Vodafone or...

Open-source leaders' reputations as jerks is undeserved

Re: rude maintainers

It was the same story with his DNS software. Which was shit and is thankfully now abandonware.

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: Memories?

"I would argue that NT 4 is when the MS rot set in"

Some of us would argue that rot started long before MS-DOS shipped.

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Re: My BS-o-meter just shot off the scale

So you're seriously telling us that either a single column in a database table containing a payment amount, or possibly a hardcoded amount in a COBOL program cannot, in any way whatsoever, be updated?

How else do you think Fujistu, IBM, Serco, Crapita, etc make their billions from government IT contracts?

Problems for the Linux kernel NTFS driver as author goes silent

Re: Hang on a mo ...

Or call it systemd.

China again signals desire to shape IPv6 standards

Re: Time for the Internet to become less US-centric..

The ITU whilst having many negatives have managed to largely keep the international telephone network running outside of national politics.

You are delusional.

The ITU does not run the international telephone network. It doesn't run anything. It never has.

It doesn't interfere in national politics or operational matters: local numbering schemes, regulation, pricing, call routing, etc. What goes on inside a country's borders is nobody else's business. The ITU is deeply involved in international geopolitics and telephony arrangements: what is and isn't a country, who gets an E.164 code point and what it is used for, cross-border tariff arrangements, etc. It fact, that's the ITU's core mission - apart from preserving its bloated and expensive bureaucracy.

BTW the Internet is something for the whole world. It's never been an extension of US imperialism.

It's largely an accident of history that global co-ordination of the Internet is done by a multistakeholder US non-profit, iCANN. Before ICANN existed, no governments cared about Internet governance. The US government realised some degree of adult supervision was needed and that body had to have support from industry and other key sectors (which included governments). ICANN was the result.

And while ICANN is flawed, it is light years ahead of what the ITU could have done if they'd been in charge. For starters, anyone can participate in ICANN and be heard. It costs nothing. Unlike the ITU where you have to pay $$$ in membership fees that can only be afforded by governments and multibillion businesses.

Re: IPv8 anyone?

Just because IP "keeps working" at higher latencies, doesn't mean it works "well" - it becomes intolerable for humans very quickly and dies entirely not long after that

Latency is principally a layer-2 issue that's governed by the speed of light. IP is layer 3.

UK government preps tech suppliers for £8bn mega framework

How hard can it be?

Why is this framework so expensive and why has it taken so long to produce it?

There will only be four questions:

1) Are you KPMG/Crapita/Serco/Delottes/Accenture?

2) Have you donated large sums to the Conservative Party?

3) Will you provide lucrative sinecures for corrupt/disgraced MPs and retired civil servants?

4) Can Baroness Dildo Harding be in charge?

If the answer to all 4 is yes, you're in.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

"Twitter needs to be a neurtral platform"

Nope. twitter needs to disappear - forever.

UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups 'targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware'

Re: Well duh

Sadly uberhauptblitzkreigfuhrer Priti Patel's plans to achieve this aren't going so well. She gave that contract to Crapita and put Baroness Dildo Harding in charge.

Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover

Re: Money can't buy maturity

And still is a manbaby.

What do you do when all your source walks out the door?

Re: that ibm document

I'm amazed you believe proof readers (and copy takers and sub-editors and...) still exist.

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Television repair

"The manufacturer saved all of about 3$ by using the crap capacitors, on a $1200 TV!"

Those crap capacitors were included so that when they failed, the manufacturer could sell another $1200+ TV. Ever heard of built-in obsolescence?

Amazon warehouse workers in New York unionize in historic win against web giant

Do not forget, Ronald Reagan WAS a Union guy!

He was so much of a union guy he fired America's air traffic controllers when they went on strike for better pay and conditions. Reagan was an FBI snitch when he was SAG president.