Posts by Gotno iShit Wantno iShit 560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2009
You've a very long wait indeed for that. The most efficient engines mankind has devised are approaching 50% efficient. You're not likely to find one that good in a car any time soon, they weight a couple of hundred tonnes and power megaships. Wikipedia says 25-30% for petrol and I guess a bit better for diesel at the car scale so most of our money is still wasted as heat.
Correction after fact check; couple of thousand tonnes. Look up Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C.
Hell will freeze over before a company named TekRpr or, GajFix gets my business but a one man band repair outfit named BggrAyshn might well get a call.
Of course this will be the second ice age in hell as the first one is needed before any IoT tat enters chez iShit and not just for the reasons Revolv demonstrates.
One of the great things about getting rid of Gordon the Clown was that several databases being implemented to keep the proles in order got the chop. Yet increasingly May is just as bad as the string of Home Secretaries we suffered under Labour. It is becoming increasingly apparent that it matters not one fig what colour ties the residents of Downing Street wear. The real power in this country is elsewhere, constant and answers to no one. We just get to choose the puppets every 5 years.
The flaw in that plan is you'd have to identify yourself to one central database from all you devices in order for the service to opt you out. The service might resist the temptation to sell you out once the founders have made their millions and moved on, it might not. You can bet though that every marketing scum on the planet would try to find a way to track you via the footprint the service leaves.
Much safer to use a unique ID per website.
No argument at that from me, I'm trying to avoid relying on one thing.
Where possible telemetry updates aren't installed (1st line of defence), SBAB confirms their absence but sits ready to block of the tasks should they appear (2nd line). I accept it relies on me correctly identifying and blocking said updates which is a monthly PITA. SBAB edits the hosts file so there is kinda a 3rd line of defence. Since the executables don't exist I can't block them at the firewall but that would be just another line of defence on the machine anyway, as you say Microsoft adapts. One day soon I shall get around to reading the manual for my router and blocking the telemetry hosts there too, a much more acceptable independent line of defence. Still relies on a correct list of telemetry hosts though.
Longer term I'm going Mint* at which point an even bigger learning curve begins. It's the monthly update filtering that has tipped me over that particular edge. Deadline is a year from now when my Action Pack subscription expires.
*Not just yet though.
"if broadband provision was markedly better, there would be less need for HS2".
There's already no real business case for HS2. It was 'justified' in an age before 3G phone signals never mind 4G. The business case written for HS2 concluded that travellers using the current line were unable to work, therefore with a faster train they'll be unable to work for a shorter time. Then came 3G, 4G, power at the seats and on train WiFi. If the whole thing were looked at afresh the report would conclude that travellers can work just fine on the current fleet, are never out of contact the whole way and so spending £50bn to save 20 minutes is a preposterous idea.
I once had to work on some embedded C a colleague had left behind. It was at the opposite end of the comments spectrum to the thermonuclear FORTRAN example above. A full screen in the editor could only have a maximum 2 lines of actual code on it due to the volume of comments. Every single line of code was followed by several paragraphs. It was all hand formatted for the authors favoured screen size with hard CRLF so you couldn't turn off line wrap. It was impossible to grok the structure of the code.
The comments didn't even help much, they were predominantly long hand of the code. "If FirstExtrordiarilyOverVerboseVariableName is a value that is greater in magnitude than ConstantDefinedInOneOfAThousandCompilerMacroFiles then the programme will proceed to execute rather than skip over the lines of code following the opening brace below this point down to the closing brace which may be found further down this file". Like that example punctuation was in short supply. You'd turn blue as you mentally ran out of breath trying to read it. The worst case we found was one sentence that ran to 8 lines.
"An 80386 based "beige" laptop, with the socket for the i387 maths co-processor"
I have one of those, 387 socket is populated IIRC but I never had a set of working NiCads for it. I'll have to dig it out and test it. Very handy for debugging serial comms problems as it has two real COM ports. By real I mean not via USB. Such a PITA when you seek out a machine with physical COM port to avoid using USB dongles and it turns out the ports are through an onboard USB hub.
Absolutely agree about Skype being a bloated pig, the protocol is just as awful as the (windows) client. So serious question: The sign in process on Windows is a hideous bandwidth hog, anything less than tethered 4G or ADSL times out before it completes. I wiresharked it once but can't recall the numbers. A reconnect is much smaller so when I'm off to work in the middle of nowhere I have to remember to sign in at home and suspend but not shut down my laptop. Then I have to ensure I reconnect as frequently as I can to prevent something timing out and a full sign in being needed. It rarely lasts a week, once a full sign in is needed and I'm screwed for the remainder of the trip so I've not actually bothered trying in over a year.
Are the Android or Linux versions any better? Would they get connected over Edge or a DSL shared with 100 other engineers all trying to do an E.T. (phone home)? I only want the text client.
"16:9 is only really a problem on lower resolution screens."
At what point does it ease? I've not used laptops over full HD and I find the ribbon* takes up more space than I'd like on my 1920x1200 desktop screens.
* Yeah I know that's not the correct name, it's actually called The Fü$king Ribbon™.
"There are many, many options for laptops with high resolution screens. You do, however, need to spend more than £50 on your laptop to benefit from this."
True, happy to do that. I also want != 16:9, currently the only way to get that is an eyewateringly expensive mac or surface. I could be persuaded to spend that much but I will absolutely NOT do so on something with limited or niche I/O, is non upgradable and non repairable.
You seem to be suggesting that in order to relieve the pressure on the grid we should go solar + powerwall? Here's a flaw or two in that plan
1) 400km range is Tesla country, way beyond the means of most. A Leaf, which is more what real people can afford, will do 175km. In the summer with a tailwind and when new.
2) A powerwall will be dead in far less than 3650 charge cycles if you use it's full capacity. If you only use 7KWh then yes one should just about last a decade.
3) 7KWh is not remotely going to get your home off grid but that's not the point, you only need an alternative source equal to what you'll be putting in your car. A Leaf with 175km range has 30KWh batteries so you need three to four powerwalls and three to four rooftops full of solar cells assuming you don't use all the 175km range.
http://rameznaam.com/2015/04/30/tesla-powerwall-battery-economics-almost-there/
The point is to get people thinking about devious code. Something that in other circumstances would be called a bug but here is deliberately coded to game the system and be subtle enough to not be seen in a code inspection.
This is exactly what any number of TLAs must (and should, it's their job) be up to and it is good to see a different kind of spotlight on it. It's exactly the sort of thinking the Open Truecrypt Audit needs to engage.
"All supported releases of Microsoft Windows carry the Xboxlive certificate"
Why? What will I lose if I kill this?
I suspect the answer is nothing unless I want to do some kind of interaction with my own XBolx or with other owners. Since I don't own one and never will (I have enough ball ache with Microsoft in my day job so R&R money goes on Sony & Nintendo) I suspect I'll lose nothing. Even if I were an XBolx owner why on earth would I want this certificate on my servers?
The rules of the road are to drive such that you can stop in the distance you can see is clear. There is no need to see through fog if you observe this. If a person prefers to drive at a fixed speed regardless of conditions then technology that can counter their stupidity will be a boon. To them at least, the Gene pool loses out again.
I wrote a long post knocking holes in the ERPScan claims. While they clearly know a great deal about SAP they know close to squat about control and automation in oil & gas. Then I decided to check the linked pdf and found this:
"It is the first Oil and Gas Cybersecurity research ever so far."
That is so epically untrue I just cannot be arsed to read any further.
You presumably need to maintain >100 posts in the past year, drop below that and you temporarily lose the badge.
I got close and chased it for a while but struggled finding two articles per week that satisfy all of; a) A subject I am knowledgeable upon, b) I have a thought upon that hasn't already been expressed, c) I give a crap about enough to post. Usually someone writes what I'm thinking expressed better than I would have and faster. So do I post lots of shite and/or 'Here, have an upvote' noise. Or do I STFU and remain badgeless?
The system seems to encourage inane chatter to me. X upvotes or net X in the past 12 months would be a more beneficial metric.
"Only sadistic sysadmins whose users suffer having to enter pre-boot passwords are immune, Haken says."
What on earth is sadistic about that? Last place I worked just about every aspect of the IT was an utter shambolic disaster. One of the few examples that wasn't was the (iirc) McAfee drive encryption with pre-boot authentication. When it got installed it just worked. Every morning it just worked. Every password change, once you knew to wait an hour and log off/on before shutting down, it just worked. Why is entering your password before boot rather than after sadistic?
Even there if you didn't know the password change trick you soon learned that for one boot cycle you'll enter the old password before boot and the new one at log in. Is that, typically once a quarter, really so insufferable?
No they don't and they never have. The sane world has called it Patch Tuesday but not Microsoft.
This has clearly irritated Microsoft so rather than do the sane thing and fall into line they are instead phasing Patch Tuesday out. Instead of a predictable, reliable schedule of updates that the world can plan for Microsoft is soon going to start pushing out whatever they like whenever they like and for added fun not tell us what updates are about any more. Planning for the arrival and deployment of f##k knows what, f##k knows when is going to be an 'opportunity' for the sane world.
It is an effective way for Microsoft to persuade the world to stop using the term Patch Tuesday. It is not, by any stretch at all sane.
It's not tough at all, either everyone's data is hovered or no ones is. I prefer the latter.
There's no justification in saying MP's should be exempt so that their constituents communications are confidential because the constituents email is hovered at their ISP.
There's no justification for saying MP's should be exempt because of national security because it's our spooks doing the hovering we're talking about.
Everyone or no one - anything else is Animal Farm.
Oh go on then, I'll bite.
First up they are not used to "to work out that a nuclear war will wipe most of humanity of the face of the earth". That's not AWE responsibility. They serve 2 functions.
First they verify that these things we taxpayers pay craploads of money to have still work decades after one was last tested. I as a taxpayer am interested that this is done. It is an economic viewpoint that is totally unrelated to my opinions as to whether we should have/keep them.
Second they verify that as they get old they aren't going to go kablooey unrequested. I'm interested that this is done from every viewpoint.
[speculation]
Or he's guilty, he knows it, and he's stalling because there's a statute of limitations nearing.
[/speculation]
No such thing for his breach of bail. I wonder if he's made any money as a result of being in the Embassy rather than in jug. Hope so, POCA should then ensure the taxpayer gets some money back for the cost of plod being on his doorstep for 4 years.
I'd prefer he continues to take his time giving it away. So far he has backed some extremely good causes and successfully avoided buying London Bridge. The faster he shovels it out the harder it will be to avoid the scammers & freeloaders. His foundation will outlive him and do good for a very long time to come.
It's a shame so much ire is being directed at the victim of this attack and not the perpetrators.
1) Spies spy, it's what they do.
2) This attack is not the same as mass hoovering of metadata, they keys taken cannot be used indiscriminately because they are only used between the handset and base station.
3) Any attempt at mass hoovering would require intercept equipment in the vicinity of every cell site in the target country. Impractical.
4) An attack using these keys forces the handset to drop to 2G, if that were happening on a mass scale someone would notice.
5) These spies have no need of the keys for targets in friendly countries, they can simply request an intercept.
So this raiding party facilitates targeted attacks against parties of interest in unfriendly countries. Pretty much what GCHQ and the NSA ought to be up to.
What I am left wondering is why within the EU they needed to go on a raiding party. It should have been possible to acquire what they needed via gagged court orders. Did they suspect a leak that would reveal their actions should they take the legal route?
...set of modules for it, I'm particularly pleased to see the 'electricity detector'. There's no shortage of devices to allow me to turn a mains powered device on or off but very few easy ways to get a pi to react to a mains powered event. E.g. when appliance X turns on then turn on appliances Y & Z as well. This is much neater than a relay.
With management in the cloud....
Yes all those cloud devices can do those things. Right up to the point your ISP goes down, a JCB goes through the fibre to your exchange, the server goes titsup, the cloud service gets retired or an incompatible upgrade or a gazillion other things you have no control over.
Or you could go the extra mile to get the smart devices to talk directly to one another and have independence & privacy. Plus, when it stops working you will know that the scope for where the problem lies rather than being 'somewhere on the planet' is 'somewhere in your house'.
Who's upset? I use Firefox with an appropriate sprinkling of blockers. I use duckduckgo mostly but am using yahoo for a few months to help pay the bills. I only use anything google as a last resort if searches elsewhere have failed and then it will be in a private window. I'm not upset about any of those decisions.
This is officially my toys out of pram moment with Flash. I am sick of unselecting crapware, selecting bloody notify only, closing tabs before the sodding 'you may also be interested in' adverts appear and all the rest of the shit. I only still have it because TomTom insist on it. Poke it Adobe. Poke it TomTom if you don't get rid on Flash before my next renewal.
And, breathe.
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