Posts by Paul Crawford

True, just ask any electrician who now finds themselves installing a lot of outdoor hot tubs.

Or "heated sex ponds" if you want a more alluring name for them.

Re: Another reason

I block my printer at the router for all external access anyway - it has buggerall need to go out and get stuff as I should be the only one feeding it print jobs, etc.

Re: At what point do you pull the plug?

Or, given they are a monopoly on UK domains, decide what is needed is real competition and allow others to operate independently and see how that goes?

Re: As has been said for some time ...

I don't worry about absolute security being unachievable.

I worry about pi55-poor security being the norm.

Re: If Bill Gates has the technology to implant chips to control people's behavior

And I am not real either.

Re: There is always Monaco

Don't forget Dyson moving his headquarters to Singapore. Shows great faith in Brexit, doesn't it?

Re: A keyboard!

Wrong play.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty cursor from day to day,

It is a init system by an idiot, full of sound and fury, logging nothing.

Re: More to the point

And what of the broadband itself causing interference to short wave listeners? The few that are left, at least.

Re: LORAN?

The LF systems like eLoran, etc, have some advantages in terms of jamming resistance and lower set-up costs than £5B for a global satellite system if you only need UK-wide / UK-waters sort of coverage.

But the running costs are high in terms of power consumption (for several stations each pumping out tens or hundreds of kW RF power) and you get far, far poorer navigation or time-keeping accuracy. Simply because of the limited bandwidth of LF signals (few kHz) compared to the 1MHz/10MHz or so bandwidth of the L-band (1.5GHz-ish) GPS coarse/precision code.

Although I still think it was a mistake to include a picture of a naked man and woman, too much like a menu selection for hungry aliens.

Not so much a menu, more as a free Club Vandersexxx T-shirt.

Re: people like "easy"

Some will say Zoom is "easy" but others would point at Cisco & MS offering and say "sucks donkey balls".

Why is it so hard for these multi-billion dollar companies to make something that just works, and just works on the majority of browsers?

No crap packages to try and install when the meeting starts and you find you don't have admin rights. No issues of not working on any browser other than Chrome (looking at you MS - as Edge is now a Chrome clone), So crap of having to create an account simple to join a meeting organised by someone else.

Zoom has a lot of flaws and I can't really say it is secure without wetting myself laughing, but the UK gov ended up using it. Not that they can rum more than 2 brain cells together, of course.

Zoom works with little trouble, why can't others do the same?!

Re: mini-cameras

Why? Because a mini-camera is simply not good enough to see the objects (in spatial or radiometric terms), and those satellites will not have the platform stability to make use of anything telescope/camera of high enough resolution anyway.

Re: Redacted

Mine too, but get the right sort of metal otherwise you cup of tee is less than splendid due to the metallic after taste.

Re: Nice little error code you got there

Had that CMOS battery fail problem on a £30k spectrum analyser that, of course, has an embedded XP machine to make it work :(

Re: Start me up!

Certainly not gettin any satisfaction...

Re: Ye Gods!

<sounds of guns and cannon fire>

What is that terrible noise?!

Oh it is hard to get a good string quartet out here.

Also, in the interest of fairness, neither can the USA.

Pot meet Kettle. Or should that be Umpa Loompa meet Winnie the Poo?

Re: Idiots

And look at us Brits, we voted in a bunch of utter incompetents after decided to cut off our biggest trading partnership and will soon our esteemed leaders will be sucking anything the USA offers to get a deal which will ruin our agriculture, etc.

We have villages missing an idiot not to be casting the first stone :(

Re: It sounds sensible

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If the Indian government insists on an "all Indian" chip, then it is a real risk (if you pardon the pun).

But if they follow on with it being truly open-source and collaborative, keep it that way in the Linux model, then everyone could benefit. The world gets a trustable and 'free' design to use, India has the pride of being its mentor, and other nations who do not trust the USA, China, etc, can take the design and bake their own silicon if they are weary of buying chips from others in case the real silicon is not quite as the VHDL release would suggest.

Re: The thing that they do

And if they want to use Linux and sell to HPC uses that rely on Linux they have to abide by the GPL, etc.

Or tell the HPC crowd to use Windows, and see how well that sells.

Re: Modern

And it also hands all of your intellectual property discussions to an overseas company beholden to the USA gov laws, and allows them to dick around with the UI and T&Cs as they please.

What, you can just change supplier? Er. going back to your own system won't be possible as that boat long will have since sailed and if you look at moving to, say, Google, you find they are worse.

Re: What the..

Won't they just Alex Salmond to comment on his RT show?

Re: Hard to say goodbye

I remember being in the "top deck" on a Japan Air 747 flight to Tokyo in the late 80s - I think they put all of the English speakers up there at that time as I was not flying business class!

But in recent years I loath flying and it is practically my last-resort means of transport.

But only by those who do not know how to clap with one hand.

The ninja turtles are OK then...

Re: Serious question from a non Unix person

While it seems like a liability in some cases (i.e. you can remove the directory entry of an in-use file) it also is the reason that UNIX like systems can do updates with far less reboots and trouble compared to Windows (that will not all this on an in-use file).

The typical approach in UNIX is you write out the new files to something like 'foo.tmp', sync the file system so it if fully committed to disk, then rename 'foo.tmp' to 'foo' which is an atomic operation (and works in the same way that removing a in-use file works - on the directory mapping to inode, not on the actual file contents). Thus any process will only ever see the old file (via an already-open handle) or new file but even if a system crash occurs around that time, never an in-modification file.

Of course any running process using the old 'foo' won't be updated but many processes and background daemons can simply be restarted (or are short lived) and the new version is now in use without disrupting anything else.

Doing the kernel is trickier as it has to be rebooted for a new kernel image, but some Linux distros support in-use kernel patching by other means.

Re: Good and bad

Communion wine? Or am I barking up the wrong ecumenical tree?

Re: A hard sell ?

Probably the CCP is less likely to whore your data to world+dog

Re: What ?

Or maybe, just filter email to strip/scan attachments and links?

Re: Huawei

Only if the telegrams are not end-to-end encrypted.

Oh wait, that is going to be made illegal by dumb politicians, isnt it?

Re: Elon Musk isn't helping, is he

Sadly Starlink will not be all at very low orbit, the ones at 1300km (and thier inevitable debris) will be hanging around for many centuries.

Re: WTF?

Wow, all the way to China!

Re: The higher the frequency, the greater the energy

I have been preserving my essence. Keeping my precious bodily fluids pure by only drinking vodka!

We can't allow a vodka-drinking gap to develop sir!

Maybe it is the version of Firefox, but it told me I had to install Chrome. I told them fsck off

Re: Threat to Earth's atmosphere?

Surely at that point it will be Cluster's last stand ?