Posts by Mike Pellatt

Re: The US Government Is Racist and Untrustworthy

The US simply ignored the WTO rulings.

Not wishing to hijack this thread.... but...... can we put that up in 50ft flashing neon lights for those who think that the UK reverting to trading with everyone under WTO rules is a Good Idea ? Rules are useless if enforcement fails..

Re: Book recommendation: Most secret war

And the TV series "The Secret War". narrated by William Woollard. It was that series, broadcast in early 1977, that spawned said book (1978). Available on DVD.

It was also this book and TV series that brought the story of Enigma, Colossus et al into broader public knowledge, notwithstanding Winterbotham's earlier book (1974). RV Jones was much more accurate, too (having been at the centre of it all)

She formed the operational base for the Olympic security operation and air exclusion zone enforcement, moored at Greenwich.

Took a visit whilst she was there. Apparently there was just a few inches under the keel at low tide.

Intel has been the Gold standard in processors.....

That was a joke, right ??

Going right back to the original 80386 which had a pretty serious Virtual 8086 mode bug (it broke the EMM emulators, needed a motherboard fix), onto the Famous FP bug - "it's not a problem, it only happens every few million instruction executions...."

All Intel have offered that's a "gold standard" is backwards compatibilty, and the only time they tried to drop that (at least in the hardware - Itanium), it didn't end well and let AMD in to define the 64-bit x86 architecture.

Although, to be fair, the Itanium issues were more about the the difficulties with VLIW architecture.

As a enthusiast then student of electronics in the 80's, I can tell you that there has never been a better time than now for a kid to get in to electronics.

As a enthusiast then student of electronics in the late 60's and 70's, I wholeheartedly agree. I in the 70's we still had GW Smith (Soho), HL Smith (Edgware Road) (got all my Denco coils for the superhet I built from them), Home Radio (Mitcham) and still loads of ex-WD 19 sets out there. But though the kit was easily available, the information, as you say, wasn't - the "maker movement" has changed all that, powered by the internet, without which it wouldn't have happened.

Re: Not the point ....

(your mail) can be read any mail router or network it passes through.

Not if the communicating MTAs are both using enforced or opportunistic encryption. At that point it's primarily your data-at-rest within the MTAs where you're at risk if the content itself isn't encrypted.

Re: Many Years Ago

The early PDP-11's were all core store. On the Unibus along with the peripherals.

My 3rd year project was programming one, as the peripheral processor on a PDP15/76, to get a GT-11 display accessible from the '15. That was fun. I sort-of did it. Enough to not disturb my getting a Desmond, anyways.

18-bit word length on the '15 mapped into the 16-bit word length on the '11. Or the other way round. I forget. It wasn't pretty.

Under (then) Dr. Bob Spence, IC, 1976

Re: ActiveX developed in naive times?

They weren't more naive times.

They were times exactly like today.

Every security professional said "FFS, don't do ActiveX. It'll be a disaster waiting to happen"

Microsoft said "Our customers want it. We're doing it"

I remember this very, very well. Especially when the sierra-hotel-one-tango subsequently hit the fan.

Rinse and repeat.

Re: Don't open unexpected attachments

Especially if you constantly email company documents that demand permission to run macros when they are opened.

You mean like the spreadsheet Microsoft Licensing emailed for completion to verify license compliance ?? And then wondered why I hadn't done anything with it ??

Because no-one would send malware pretending to be from Microsoft, would they ?

Re: @AC - The problem all too often is the MSM

Based on when and where you were arrested ? That's scary to me!

It's exactly how it works at the moment. See "Ferguson".

So what's so bad about automating it ?

Re: Ummm, Tim 99...

Used under very close supervision, though. Here's an original training video. Complete with Ford Transit being driven like a shot from The Sweeney :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BMop6GA2iI

Re: Sweet Spot

a bit of public speaking training should be in every professional or degree course

Isn't it ? if not then the world is going backwards. Because it sure was in my elec eng degree in '73-'76. Along with "associated studies" in a mostly-vain attempt to make engineers "well-rounded"

Then again, I suppose Imperial's always been ahead of the curve. I see the Pimlico Project is still going after over 40 years. Sinclair Goodlad led the way.

I've looked after a (very) small engineering firm whose (sole) CNC machine tool is controlled by a Windows 95 PC. No way would that ever go near the internet. Sourced bits for all of it to have some hardware spares, except the multi-port serial card, the sight of which took me back to SCO Unix and green screen days :-)

Indeed - it is exactly their job to do this.

And it's not the first time. In fact, Firefox acted much faster than Google over the StartCom/WoSign shenanigans, but Google have done the same with them.

Re: Scrap HS2

And spend twice as much, with 10x the disruption, upgrading the existing infrastructure to fail to meet the increasing demand for rail travel. Great idea.

HS2 has been totally mis-sold. It's absolutely necessary, but not for the reasons generally articulated.

Re: Lies, damned lies and ...

Unless you can stop governments coming up with ideas and trying to do (or un-do) things, no, it won't shrink.

Along with that, you need to stop the populace demanding that "they" (i.e. Government) fix "it" (whatver the "it" may be that in reality Government can, at best, fiddle at the edges with - lack of housing, too many jobs, too few jobs, too many immigrants, too few immigrants, the weather, the trains (they sure broke them..), road congestion, etc., etc.)

Re: An admirable effort.

Certificate expiry every 90 days is exactly the right thing to do to reduce the consequences of key & cert theft/leakage, given the mess that is Certificate Revocation.

It's absolutely not a PITA, especially as the renewal is easily automated.

And as for IIS, it's not rocket science to use DNS verification via an existing Linux client, convert the key & certs to the IIS format and install them, all automatically. You could even do it all under Windows using cygwin.

Re: POSIX

FWIW, Poettering doesn't count lack of POSIX compliance as of any consequence.

See: Cockwomble

https://lwn.net/Articles/430598/

I remember the particle physicist (it might even have been Jim Virdee in his PhD student days) running an overnight job on our DecSystem10 that produced a whole box of line printer paper for its output.

He looked at the first page, realised it had all gone wrong, and scrapped the output.

Still, it helped the Christmas Party fund along niceley.

Re: Private Eye always has

Your "Private Eye ad nauseam" is my "Private Eye told the world all about <x>, repeatedly, years before anyone else woke up to it"

Re: Split brain

That tallies nicely with "people getting random destinations on scanning boarding cards" mentioned earlier

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

And taking an open source project and "repurposing" it for internal use, without any external redistribution taking place, is against the letter (and spirit) of precisely which open-source licenses ??

Re: Robots

The problem is indeed with specification

Isn't that what agile/DevOps is really all about ?? No-one knows what the inputs are, let alone what they want the outputs to be. But if we can hack what happens in between quickly, we'll iterate to something vaguely workable far quicker than going all "formal" ??

Re: An even better one....

Oi !!! I was going to link to the estimable Mr. White's hilarious conversations with the usually-deaf.

But I hadn't seen that one. Hilarious. And he managed to avoid any mention of ponies until his second email.

Re: Shipping

Indeed. Immarsat are the big boys.

Re: Why oh why would you use Ubuntu

In the days of CentOS 5 and 6, wot he was referring to, it WAS independent. It's only this year (definitely post-Centos 7) that Embrace has happened. I'm waiting and watching to see how/if the next 2 steps will work out :-)

And, IIRC (I've pretty much moved off CentOS for mostly the reasons he enumerated) the only changes, back then, were rebranding, apart from very esoteric bits, binary compatibility being pretty much the only goal of CenOS. CentOSplus gave you extra goodies, though.

Oh, I now see someone else just said that. As you were.

Re: Pet feeder

My lab is looking very content at the moment.

The cat's throwing up everywhere.

The goldfish doesn't fit in the bowl any more.

Re: Yet another go at improving the efficency of the court system through IT

Hint. It's not the IT, it's the processes you need to get better first, and that means getting people involved who actually use them

But you've missed the gov.uk mantra that you use IT to drive organisational change, because, well, people. And a new name for e-gov, innit.

Another mantra that flies in the face of all the evidence and research.

Re: I've forgotten...

Thus you hear stories of init scripts that reverse the order of network adapters

That got fixed nearly a decade ago. Though some recent Bright Ideas seem to be trying to un-fix it.

Re: I don't care what he's been accused of

When we lost the right to silence with the password law that should have been a red flag to everyone

It was to everyone who understood, or thought about, it.

But we're going down the same path again.

Re: So what's the message here, then ??

If NR think they can get 24 tph (trains per hour) in each direction in the peaks through the Thameslink core then can I have some of what they are smoking please?

And even more, temporarily, when "recovering from perturbation".

Which is why I descibed it as "really brave". Yes, mad might be a better description. Especially given how many separate routes need to be merged together coming into the core (and even more now they're proposing to add in Rainham via Dartford, because Windmill Bridge can't handle the traffic...)