* Posts by Lusty

1683 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Let 15 July forever be known as P-Day: When UK's smut fans started being asked for their age

Lusty

GDPR

Thank goodness the GDPR exists. This means that since it's not necessary to store personal information to verify age it's illegal to require it. It'll be interesting to see how they implement the verification systems.

Personally I can see the post office passes being shared online, making the whole system worthless. After all they can't posisbly be single use or this will just turn into a tax on pornography...oh wait...doh!

As long as there's fibre somewhere along the line, High Court judge reckons it's fine to flog it as 'fibre' broadband

Lusty

Red Lorries

This is a terrible analogy. On the surface it seems reasonable but you're ignoring a lot of the issues with copper. A better analogy would be two companies, one using brand new lorries and one using knackered old lorries. In the first instance they guarantee to be able to consistently take ALL of your rubbish every day at a specific time. In the second, they probably can on the first day, but as time goes on they start dropping some rubbish in the street because the lorry is missing some bits. They also start getting later and later until you phone them and they fix the service for a few weeks before getting worse again.

Copper lines degrade over time and need to be reset because they gradually negotiate lower speeds to compensate for crappy copper lines and interference. This is observable by checking your speed at the router after a reset and then checking again a while later, it's designed into the system for reliability and is also the reason for the modem song and dance when you used to use dial up. Fibre to the home doesn't suffer from this at all so the bandwidth and latency you buy is the bandwidth and latency you receive whether it's higher/lower/faster/slower than copper.

Lusty

Re: Utterly Shameful decision.

It's possible that 30Mbps is all the average home needs. At that point latency is the biggest issue for things like gaming. FTTP is then better than FTTC but with no reasonable marketing terms available because they've already been used elsewhere to wrongly describe something else. Quoting ever higher bandwidths is a pointless exercise when Netflix works fine with 2Mbps

And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

Lusty
Flame

Heat

At 400W per socket, a measure I will call "Wockets" from now on, it's a wonder that cloud providers are not cashing in on the heat. My hottub only needs 3KW to heat it, so at 400 wockets we'd only need a couple of beefy servers to run it. Extend that out and we could have Azure health spas next to every data centre with hot tubs, saunas, steam rooms, pools etc. all heated by the DC. With the right setup and enough wockets you could probably have a bakery running using some clever heat exchanger. Or a pizza joint. Yes, the more cores the more pies you get cooked for free. This is the future!

NASA's first all-woman spacewalk outside ISS cancelled – due to lack of spacesuits that fit

Lusty

Re: Basic Logistics

I'd imagine there are more suit "clothing" parts than tech parts (such as breathing gubbins or heating/cooling bits). As a result they probably add the tech bits to the appropriate size suit as needed, allowing a choice of sizing without too much stuff in space. They have a pretty busy schedule so I guess there just isn't a window between now and the planned date to reconfigure. That said I'm sure that one of the ladies would make some time...

Year 1 of GDPR: Over 200,000 cases reported, firms fined €56 meeelli... Oh, that's mostly Google

Lusty

No, they were given power to kick names and take ass...in cool jackets.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/12/ico_raid_nuisance_callers/

Not entirely toothless after all.

Lusty

It takes about 30 seconds to report once you have the below link. I'd imagine my repeated use of this helped the authorities find and raid those offices recently. In that article they stated around 400 complaints which isn't much so maybe that's why this stuff isn't being stamped out? ALWAYS report these things. These people need evidence to act upon.

https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/nuisance-calls-and-messages/spam-texts-and-nuisance-calls/report-spam-texts-and-nuisance-sales-calls/

Brouhaha over IBM using Flickr faces for AI training, big trouble in not-so-little China for Microsoft, and more

Lusty

Re: Ts & Cs

How would you know there's a picture of you in the service in the first place? It's not like they can search for your name, and your picture could be in hundreds of accounts without your knowledge!

Lusty

Re: Ts & Cs

That must have changed since I last read it then, which has been a couple of years at least. I don't keep going back to such places on the off chance they've discovered privacy!

How do they handle the PetaBytes of data uploaded prior to these changes? Do those users get their rights back, or are all those pics still open to abuse? Under the old terms Flickr were free to keep your pictures after you deleted them and carry on selling them to whoever they wished. And they did. There are many reported cases of people seeing pics of themselves on billboards etc. as well as this latest issue in the article.

No, I don't care that they changed the terms, this company has a track record that says all I need to know about their intentions.

Lusty
Facepalm

Ts & Cs

Anyone posting photo's to Flickr loses their right to be outraged. I've gone to sign up several times since it launched, and every time I read the Ts & Cs I changed my mind and told all my friends to avoid them like the plague. Partly because they explicitly state they can and will do things like this...

The real question here is - can the people in the photos take action against the muppets who uploaded their image to a site which had that in the Ts & Cs?

Freelance devs: Oh, you wanted the app to be secure? The job spec didn't mention that

Lusty

Re: €100 (~$112) or €200 (~$225)

"the choice is obvious: onshore staff"

And to which shore are you referring? Presumably you're being racist towards India, so what should a company in Mumbai do? You seem pretty down on the idea of offshoring, so are they just destined to use poor resources in your system?

Offshoring is not the problem. Quality control is the problem. One is xenophobic propaganda and the other is a genuine concern for the business output. Other countries can do things cheaper, that's a real thing. It's not because they aren't educated, nor is it because they don't know what they are doing. It's because things cost less where they live. If the people in YOUR country can't be arsed to QA the results then that's on you.

Crowdfunded lawyer suing Uber told he can't swerve taxi app giant's £1m legal bill

Lusty

Re: Who is ultimately responsible for collecting/paying the VAT

"We need them to retain and distribute those profits such that the economy functions."

That was my point. It's not one economy. Uber are sucking one economy dry and putting the money into another. Tax is the method by which we balance that usually, in order to retain some of the money in the original economy. The EU and IMF are there to rebalance on a wider scale than just within one economy.

As an example the UK gives money to the EU from taxes collected overwelmingly in London, and some of that money will be sent by the EU to pay for roads and education in Wales. The people of Wales will then buy goods and services from London based companies. This also works if you replace Wales with Romania.

Lusty

Re: Who is ultimately responsible for collecting/paying the VAT

Firstly, he's not a lawyer, he's a barrister. They are very different things.

What he's actually doing is trying to change the law in the way the UK legal system was designed. Everybody seems to be in agreement that the way VAT is collected in this instance is wrong. He's using this case to make it right. It's not about proving Uber are doing something wrong right now so much as changing the way they work in the future. Uber will fight this because if they become liable for the VAT then by definition the drivers will work for them and they become just another cab company with all of the responsibilities that go with that.

I'm not sure which side I'm on. Uber have technically done nothing wrong, their service is good when they are allowed to operate.

We do need that tax money though. If too much money flows away from a country without being taxed at source then there will be trouble ahead. Entities like the EU and IMF tax at a wider scale and return via subsidies to redistribute, but that isn't an ideal way to get the money back to the right places.

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Lusty

Re: Office 365

"your broadband goes down you get stranded without your data"

You're confusing "the Internet" with "your data". Office 365 works just fine without Internet access. Maybe you're thinking of OneDrive?

Lusty

Re: Office 365

"I would rather use a traditional desktop version"

So...O365 then. The primary difference between them is licensing. O365 allows you to install on multiple systems including mobile devices. The 2019 boxed product does not. The other difference is that O365 gets new features as they arrive while 2019 won't get most of them. There's also a web version of O365, but that's not as good as installing locally.

Patch this run(DM)c Docker flaw or you be illin'... Tricky containers can root host boxes. It's like that – and that's the way it is

Lusty

Re: kata-containers

“an higher”

While it may be usual to speak like a cockney (an ‘igher) it’s not usual to write like one. If you’re going to use the h then use a.

Typescript, PostgreSQL and Visual Studio Code all get slathered with a little Microsoft lovin'

Lusty

Re: Kudos for the PostgreSQL love

Bob, you have issues if you're that concerned about escaped quote symbols. Implementation is always tied to the platform and version. Always. Especially when using "standards".

RIP 2019-2019: The first plant to grow on the Moon? Yeah, it's dead already, Chinese admit

Lusty

Re: Puzzled

Those people who challenge the status quo usually have a reasonable hypothesis and an explanation of why things might be different than expected. I'm sure the person who suggested the earth wasn't flat had some sort of explanation as to why they thought that and how they'd go about proving it was round.

Lusty

Re: Puzzled

No the point is to try new things and see what happens. Scientists don't generally try things which 90% of the population already know won't work. I love that they went to the moon and it's great PR for a country so burdened with US propaganda as China, but science could already work out the temperature of a lunar night and tell you plants would hate it that cold. I assume they knew all that though and did it anyway for the PR which makes me love them even more. This shows China really doesn't need the US, and that's a great result.

Oh snap: AWS has only gone and brought out its own Backup

Lusty

Re: AWS backups are based on snapshots

You don't have to delete other snaps first VSS allows mounting of any snapshot so you can copy the data out. You're thinking about rollback which is different to restoring data.

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

Yes, he showed his annual usage bill. It's not hard to be net positive on energy these days. All lighting is LED which uses almost no power. With heat exchangers it's quite easy to use power only to transfer heat from the air or the ground rather than consuming power to create new heat, a much more efficient approach. 1/3 of the power in the UK grid is now renewable so I don't understand why such an intelligent bunch as Reg readers find it so hard to believe renewables work just fine and are sustainable. It's not even like we've used a huge percentage of our land or coast for this. There are solar farms around most towns now, sure, and there are offshore wind farms in conspicuous locations where the infrastructure exists to manage them. The vast majority of the country is untouched though.

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

"have you worked out _how much_ solar panel you actually need to take the average EV on your daily commute?"

I'll do you one better. A friend of mine with a modest PV installation not only powers his house and car but also sells quite a bit back to the grid. He even started buying toys like electric bikes to use some of the excess. No need to work it out, I've seen it in real life and it's more than sustainable. He doesn't skimp on the miles in his car either.

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

"The fast way to convince Greens is to ask them to calculate how much electricity is needed vs how much "renewables" can produce"

They've done it, years ago. The answer was "plenty". We're a good way along that journey now if you look at the proportion of renewables used in the grid. It's higher than you think, but I doubt you'll bother to look.

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

Also, you're assuming the EV couldn't drive home and charge itself while you work...

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

"But one big issue with the EV charging idea; you're at work during the day when your solar generates excess power - which means, your EV isn't at your home and can't charge on "free" electrons. Once the sunlight is gone, you come home and plug your EV in..."

The concept of "at work" is very quickly changing. As is the idea of a commute. Long term I don't expect all this unnecessary travel to continue at all. My (global) employer is about to reduce building count fairly drastically in the UK to account for changes in working patterns.

But to more directly answer your question for right now, the daytime power can easily be used for heat transfer either from the house to a water tank, or from outside to a water tank so that you have hot water while you're at home. In summer, we should also be using heat exchangers to move hotness from indoors to the hot tub. Parking at the office could easily be hooked up to solar power too, which can also double up as a roof for the carpark and a water harvesting platform to solve the "water crisis".

To answer another part of the thread, we very rarely need a full tank in the morning. Hence why the ML in the cars allow them to work out how much to keep in reserve. If every house is hooked up we all share the supply and the demand. There are a surprising number of people on this thread who seem to be resiting any and all change and clinging to the large infrastructure. The very notion that PV only works at large scale is ridiculous. Its very nature means it's a linearly scaleable resource, but the proximity to usage can and will reduce infrastructure cost and complexity.

Lusty

Re: Interesting idea

The local hot water storage is a great point, but as is EVs. If you remove the requirement for heating from your power consumption then the relatively small remainder (given low power modern gadgets) could easily be handled by the battery in a modern EV overnight. If every house had on average one EV connected you've already solved the overnight problem at grid scale.

ML would be able to predict EV usage to give you sufficient juice to get where you're going in the morning, and once there you can charge from the solar again. A simple routine could cope with exceptions, perhaps linked to your diary - certainly O365 can supply destination addresses.

We need to stop thinking big infrastructure and start thinking small and scalable. In IT speak, let's start scaling out instead of scaling up because it's almost always easier and cheaper. It'll even mean a lower capacity grid, so infrastructure costs will be lower accross the board. We all already have meters (many of them "smart") in homes to watch where power is flowing.

And don't even get me started on rainwater capture at the property level rather than moaning about water shortages...

5.. 4.. 3.. 2.. 1... Runty-birds are go: 12,000+ internet-beaming mini-satellites OK'd by USA

Lusty

Re: Cameras

You sound like those photographers who didn't think camera phones could do real pictures. Technology moves on, especially for government agencies :)

Well slap my ass and call me Judy, Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 is just as hard to fix as the old one

Lusty

Re: Overpriced

"I guess only disposal fees will make this crap less desirable"

The WEEE directive is part of the reason they do cost more these days, so probably not.

With sorry Soyuz stuffed, who's going to run NASA's space station taxi service now?

Lusty
WTF?

Re: space station boring

Not sure what you mean by "very little coming out of running a space station". Do you think the people up there are on holiday?

IBM won't grow, says analyst firm while eyeing flatlining share price

Lusty

This is kind of the point, you think architectures struggle to scale to a billion customers, but modern cloud architectures don't struggle at all. I never said it couldn't virtualise, I said I don't see why I would run containers or Linux VMs on such over priced hardware. The only reason I can think of is clock speeds being higher, but it's very rare to have something so single threaded and latency sensitive these days. My point abou the architecture is that it is designed for scale-up solutions, and hence costs a ton of money. For scale out you're far better off using lots of very cheap systems.

On the point about cloud - it has nothing at all to do with on prem vs off prem. Cloud is a very specific solution and Mainframe is not it whether they've slapped that badge on in the software or not. It just doesn't meet the requirements as set out by NIST, and even IBM's "cloud" isn't a cloud solution, it's just rebadged colo for the most part. All of the platforms I work with also have end to end encryption, this isn't a new thing. We also have homomorphic encryption too so that data can be used while encrypted in a database more usefully.

I agree, you can be agile on a Mainframe. It's just that nobody is, and every change costs millions. Of course, that can be solved with Linux VMs, but then why have a Mainframe? Every argument comes down to why would you choose to go to the more expensive hardware to implement the same solution, and there are no good answers to that other than 1. you work for IBM or 2. your knowledge is decades out of date.

Lusty

I can't tell what your argument for moving to Mainframe is though? Lintel does everything you describe there and it does it in a cheaper, more scale out manner. It also exists as a real cloud offering, whereas you just used the term cloud on one rack of hardware that you have to buy (Thanks to IBM Marketing, no doubt!). Cloud is a very well defined term these days, and IBM do not participate in that industry in any meaningful way, especially not with Mainframe hardware.

Your concept of moving to Mainframe once you start to scale is extremely out of date too. Mainframe was designed as a scale up solution which had very real limits. Modern cloud architectures are designed to use massive scale out with multiple containers or VMs to avoid the limitations of older architectures. As a result we no longer need bigger hosts. I'm sure you could use IBM systems to host your containers, but the question would be why, given the high costs?

If you're relying on hardware/software to keep you up and available in 2018 you've missed a lot of things at architect school. These days we plan for failure, expect failure, and plan for a retry of the process. The banks have more than proven how reliable Mainframe is in reality in a modern agile world. Reliability came from the fact that in the 1980s people weren't changing things and adding new features daily. They also weren't connected to a billion customers.

Python lovers, here's a library that will help you master AI as a newbie

Lusty
Terminator

Re: All it takes is a few lines of code

Unfortunately you also need to be a billionaire to affort the hardware on which to run it by lunchtime. My sentient cyber brain is at the angry toddler stage after a year of training on an old Pentium 4...mwahahahaha

Lusty

Maths

"Many people think they need to spend years studying advanced math first [to learn AI]"

Not true. ML and AI are already commoditised to the point that a toddler could train a model. Many people do, however, think that you need to understand maths to know if your model is doing what it's supposed to. If the "what it's supposed to" is any more detailed than producing an output, any output, then you'll probably want a keen understanding of maths.

You're alone in a room with the Windows 10 out-of-the-box apps. What do you do?

Lusty

Re: A/B testing

A/B testing is what led to Vista. Do you really want the majority to win in a vote about OS choices again? Technical people are a tiny tiny minority which is why Linux is really popular here but the year of Linux on the desktop will never come. The normals don’t like it.

Linux kernel's Torvalds: 'I am truly sorry' for my 'unprofessional' rants, I need a break to get help

Lusty

Re: Aspergers

@ForthIsNotDead that's a pretty intolerant view you have there.

Aspergers is a mental condition and is not something you can choose to do or not do. It's like any other disability except is not visible. What you are suggesting is akin to demanding those lazy wheelchair users just get up and walk. They aren't lazy, they just can't walk.

If he truly does have Aspergers then I'll be surprised if what he's trying to do will make a real long term difference. The issue isn't just acting differently it's perceiving the world differently. As an Aspie myself (I have a diagnosis) I've been in many situations where people I trust are telling me I'm in the wrong yet when I review all the facts I still don't see an issue. Linus is likely the same, as he said in the note that he's gone for years sometimes without reading the situation the way others do. His reactions are perfectly reasonable for his perception of the situation, and that's the part that's almost impossible to fix.

He will ALWAYS see these people as incompetent morons. Some of them probably are. Others just aren't communicating in a way that an Aspie can understand.

"If you spoke to people at work the way he does you'd get fired."

Not if you have a diagnosis, that would be illegal in most countries as disability discrimination. More likely your company would have to help you in day to day life, for instance by providing a mentor to discuss reactions before responding. We can recognise inflammatory wording, so it's possible to train ourselves to get a third party perspective before hitting send. Of course, just because we can spot it, doesn't mean we think we need another opinion - another issue!

Microsoft accidentally let encrypted Windows 10 out into the world

Lusty
Trollface

Re: Does anybody here remember...

"You're fighting the largest company in the world with that."

Walmart? Why would they stop you improving Windows?

Microsoft: You don't want to use Edge? Are you sure? Really sure?

Lusty

Re: Dear Microsoft

Read it yourself..."in the latest Windows Insider builds"

Lusty

Re: Dear Microsoft

I don't think it's unreasonable in preview software for the vendor to expect you to fully test all features and ask you to use their programs. If this is in post release then we can rightly kick up some fuss and I'll be front of the queue.

I know, not a popular viewpoint; downvote away.

Official: Google Chrome 69 kills off the World Wide Web (in URLs)

Lusty

Re: I detest that

"At the OS level they do not have any meaning, they way they do in DOS and Windows."

DOS doesn't use extensions either, it works identically to Linux in this in that you'd need to launch a program to use a file, and on Windows this works the same way as Linux - it'll joyfully launch the program and try to open the file then fail if it's incapable. I'm not sure what you all think is so baked into Windows around file extensions, but there's nothing there other than a list of extensions and default programs just like in Linux DEs. These are there just for convenience when you double click a file. The only exception to this is that DOS and Windows will only try to execute files with a few extensions such as EXE and BAT while Linux will run anything that has the executable bit set.

Also, no need to get personal and start name calling. You may be a Linux developer, but that's no excuse to act like you're Linus!

Lusty

Re: I detest that

@jake that's horseshit every Linux distro I've used has had a config to recognise file extensions and launch apps accordingly, and my first Linux installed from floppy disk. The difference is that Linux doesn't use a file extension to determine executability. It does use extensions to determine how to use files though, as do all modern operating systems. Double click an image file with html as an extension and see what happens next. Does your OS launch GIMP or Chrome?

Lusty

Re: I detest that

Could be worse, on Linux you could have a .txt or .jpg extension which the OS will happily execute as a script based on permissions. Extensions aren't a good security feature on any OS, but if you want to show them it's blindingly easy in Windows Explorer.

Thunderstruck: Azure Back in Black(out) after High Voltage causes Flick of the Switch

Lusty

Re: Texas - Europe ?

Nope, this is fully documented. Azure AD has always been a global service where data is not guaranteed to be in region.

Also, there are disaster recovery procedures in place which would have been used if recovery were not underway, which it was. What I think you mean is business continuity, and I agree it's disapointing that AAD isn't designed for availability across regions.

If you weren't rich enough to buy a Surface before, you may as well let that dream die

Lusty

Re: Satya Nadella is The Man With The Golden Gum

@Dvd if there is room for screws you have a shitty big old fashioned laptop. Not a fair comparison. Find another ultra slim or convertible that lets you replace componentsnd maybe there's some discussion to be had but the Surface range hits each niche perfectly well and MS replaces hardware with issue for free so you don't need to repair it. iFixit have a vested interest in bashing this stuff, and getting nerds all worked up about lack of screws is their business model. My department of 30 all had new Surface Book or Pro a year ago - zero issues. I don't even know anyone who has had issues and the business has thousands of these. Personally I swapped my Macbook Pro for a Surface Laptop and it's the best move I've made. Better hardware and better software, and the blue laptop even trumps Apple for style.

Congress wants CVE stability, China wants your LinkedIn details, and Adobe wants you to patch Creative Cloud

Lusty

CVE Funding

No, no, no, no NO! US government funding for CVE will remove any and all trust I have in the system. Instead, why not require commercial software companies to pay for the system? It's their bugs being reported anyway. The US Gov is too eager to have access to backdoors and exploits already, and this kind of funding would allow them a way to retain exclusive access to these for longer while the rest of us are spied on. Not OK.

Quit that job and earn $185k... cleaning up San Francisco's notoriously crappy sidewalks

Lusty
Terminator

Scope creep

Yes it's well paid for picking up and disposing of crap and needles. What they fail to mention is phase two when you'll have to start disposing of the bodies...

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

Lusty

Unfair contract terms

Write what you like in the terms US lawyers, some of us live in free countries where your contract isn't worth wiping an arse with anyway. The only thing that bothers me with EULA and similar is that I lose 0.2 seconds clicking "I agree" while laughing and having not read your unenforceable bullshit.

Redis has a license to kill: Open-source database maker takes some code proprietary

Lusty

Suicide

Time for a fork then. In a year nobody will remember Redis and AWS/Azure will switch to a forked version which will become the new default. Fighting Amazon isn't generally a worthwhile endeavor, and closing source that people (probably including Amazon and MS employees) have contributed is just a dick move.

As it turns out, no, you can't just run an unlicensed Bitcoin money exchange

Lusty

Re: "No, you can't just run an unlicensed Bitcoin money exchange"

Ah developer misunderstandings, my favourite joke

"Could you please go shopping for me and buy one carton of milk, and if they have eggs, get 6?"

Windows 10 Linux Distribution Overload? We have just the thing

Lusty

Re: It's all lies

"Reportedly MS have done MSSQL on Linux by doing a Windows kernel interface shim for Linux. They can put win32.dll and everything else on that, and software that uses these DLLs has no idea that there's no NT kernel underneath. So with that installed, a Linux can now also be a Windows too. At least to some extent."

That's not how SQL Server on Linux works. SQL Server was already very agnostic to OS and didn't need the Windows kernel. The "shim" only includes a couple of calls which weren't already inside SQL Server to make it compatible. It's actually very good engineering when you look closely at it.