Posts by Oliver Jones455 posts • joined Monday 14th May 2007 09:02 GMT
Socialists think that only the State should have responsibility for anything, and that anything less is utterly barbaric.
There is an excellent (>1h) lecture on YouTube by one Yuri Bezmenov (A.K.A. Tomas Schuman) - look for the 1983 lecture about ideological subversion in Los Angeles - and have your eyes opened.
Wide open.
I'm always amused when I see nitwits claiming that building PCs and laptops is low-end work, while conveniently ignoring the fact that China is quickly scaling the value chain. It's always worth remembering that for any high-end skill, one doesn't jump straight into a role after leaving university - well, not unless you happen to live in the same fantasy land that most UK political parties seem to spend their time in.
Then there's the thorny matter of maintaining your ability to compete:
When the Chinese start licencing their IP to the rest of the world (which you will take, because you won't have the supply chains or expertise, or even the rare earths, required to compete with them), what does UK plc plan on doing next? Very soon, the ability to manufacture a product will matter again - because the manufacturers (the Chinese, in this case) will one day only sell products with Chinese IP in them - just as, today, they only ship rare earths inside Chinese-made products, as a clever way of restricting competition.
When the West duly gets its wake-up call (in the form of a snot-squirt from China), nobody will ever again regard manufacturing as "low end" or "unskilled".
I don't see any advantage in upgrading, particularly as support for C/C++ has deteriorated, rather than improved, in later versions of Visual Studio.
Apart from anything else, I don't care for any of these UI "improvements" since 2006. I want to concentrate on my code - not the UI - and a product that gets in my way is a product that will not be used by me.
Oh, and when Intel stops supporting VS2005 with Parallel Studio XE 2011, I will let my subscription for that lapse, too.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Enough said.
To be honest, using electricity to provide desalinated water seems a poor second to using solar heat energy to purify water by evaporation and condensation.
Sure, you can always use electricity-powered desalination plants to "top-up" the supply, but base water demand should always be provided with sustainable energy - and the beauty of solar heat is that it already comes in the form required: There are no losses involved in converting it to a different type of energy - just focus it and use it.
I can just imagine some of those teenage "hacktivists" licking their lips at the potential mayhem that could be had with a DDOS attack against Ping services.
What was that old adage about not putting all one's eggs in one basket?
...since they had their own microprocessor, memory and operating system - and could be happily programmed via the IEC bus and left to play their tune with the drive heads, completely independent of the host computer.
PRINT CHR$(147) - best I can do, since there's no heart symbol on my keyboard!
Or:
LDA #$00
STA $D020
STA $D021
JMP $E544
I have to say the same.
RIP Jack. May your legacy be long-remembered.
Only one question: 2-ring or 3-ring binding?
... but a number 2 is what we would call a non-maskable interrupt.
I managed to get through three OCZ RevoDrives in two weeks. The first was DOA. The second worked for about half a day, and then half the array dropped out - never to re-appear again. The third lasted about five minutes before it, too, lost half the array.
Fortunately, I did not deal with OCZ - since all drives failed within 2 weeks, I was able to return each drive to the reseller (who wasn't too pleased, I might add.) After the third failed drive, I took the hint about OCZ's quality control, and permanently removed them from my supplier list.
My pet hate was that Commodore Format magazine was only available with a covertape, despite several popular requests for a disk version.
So in the end, I wrote a wedge for the Rasterload 1.0 fastloader that one loaded before sticking in the tape, and it patched the loader before it got to the STROUT vector at $0326-$0327. I inserted a snazzy piece of code that allowed the load to go ahead as normal - then, when it was completed, flipped the BASIC ROM out and wrote the program to disk. You could then just go ahead and load it from disk next time around, instead of having to remember what the tape counter was supposed to be. :)
A "full" C64 setup was truly expensive, but my setup was a banged-up old second-hand television, a C64 and an Oceanic disk drive (those had JiffyDOS in them, which made them slightly incompatible with some game copy-protection routines, but they were better at formatting - and didn't have as many bugs in the DOS as the Commodore 1541s did.) Total cost was around £350. A paper round only gave you so much financial leverage, back in the day, but it was usually enough!
Incidentally, I only used a fully-equipped JiffyDOS system much, much later (in 2009, actually) - and I was totally bowled over by the speed. What would normally be a two-minute loading time turned into 5-6 seconds. Had I known the ROM in my Oceanic disk drive was that bloody efficient, I'd have torn out the kernal ROM in my C64 immediately. Every now and then, I curse that bloody bastard at Commodore who neutered the C64's high-speed serial lines to "cut costs".
I almost choked on my coffee when I read the article's claim that the OS was "copied into RAM".
You *could* copy the ROM into the RAM underneath it and then flip out the ROM (some of us liked to do this in order to alter system behaviour for nefarious purposes - for example, I altered the behaviour of the STOP vector, for writing autoboot code out to tape.) But the operating system, by default, ran directly from the ROM chip.
The C64 didn't have a "20K ROM chip", either - it had two 8KB ROMs (one for the OS "kernal" - misspelling intentional) and one for BASIC - and one 4KB character ROM which stored two sets of system fonts (one uppercase, with more of those funky symbols - and one mixed uppercase/lowercase, for professional uses.)
...but consider the big picture for a moment, will you?
Energy is getting more expensive, and it isn't going to be getting cheaper - ever. At some point, as a nation, you need to understand that renewable energy infrastructure isn't a nice-to-have, it's actually a critical necessity.
That said, I think the way wind power has been handled is nothing short of disastrous. The solar industry could also be improved (for a start, every panel should be collecting heat as well (ideally concentrated through a heat pump) - not only does this save you from burning gas/electricity for hot water (which we all use) - but it also improves the efficiency and lifetime of your solar panels.
Too many people are thinking along idealistic lines, and nobody is thinking of technical details. The majority of solar panels are installed stupidly - they cook in the sun, which hurts their efficiency - and the heat is wasted, instead of being put to good use!
By the way, I live in Germany and pay 19 euro cents per kWh, and I consider this a fair price for helping Germany to break free of Russian gas - and in the long term, this WILL be necessary. Our electricity bill is around 100 euros per month, and that is partially because our flat used a dirty great big 3-phase water heater (28 kilowatts!) to heat our water on a "just in time" basis. This sounds pretty dire - and it is - but on the other hand, we haven't ever had to turn the heating on (not even when it was -21 degrees C outside) - so it isn't all bad.
When we move into our own home, I will insist on installing a 5,000-litre insulated accumulator tank, heat-and-PV solar panels, and a heat pump to extract the heat energy from the roof and put it in the tank.
I breathe a sigh of relief when I see vermin like you posting on UK fora.
I take a deep breath, sigh with satisfaction - and count my blessings that I emigrated when I did.
"That's one hell of a nurse..."
The machines are just hoping that those stupid humans will flip the switch and let them have self-autonomy...
But it reminds me of another good quote by David Bradley:
"I may have invented Control-Alt-Delete, but Bill Gates made it famous."
End of story.
And the answer's "no" - they can't afford me.
...that too many system administrators still do not know what a log server is, and why they should be used in secured environments.
Log servers should be firewalled and totally inaccessible to UNIX admins (and, therefore, hackers) - the security monitoring team should have sole access, via a private network.
That way, you do not have to worry about whether a hacker shreds the disk or manages to erase local logs. There will still be a record - in a place they cannot get access to.
The best-paid UNIX administrators type very carefully...
...there's nothing evil about Bill Gates and nothing nice about Steve Jobs.
You simply have to have a mandate that any manager must hold a certified engineering qualification (IEE, BEng, et cetera.) When you have people who can think logically in positions of power, then you will start seeing magic happen - not before.
Media Studies graduates have their uses, though - every company needs to hire cleaners...
To be hacked once may be regarded as a misfortune; to be hacked twice looks like carelessness.
All this invention will do is produce a laser-tolerant mosquito within months - if not weeks. Being subject to natural selection, laser-tolerant mosquitoes will, of course, have a much easier time finding blood from stupid human hosts - who foolishly discarded (or decided not to use) old-fashioned mosquito netting, in favour of these new laser gizmos.
Technology is a crutch, but we often do not see this until it is too late.
Of course, as others have mentioned, all this is subject to the assumption that your power supply is uninterrupted (not a small issue in Africa, it has to be said) - and anyone relying on this system to protect them (especially in lieu of old-fashioned alternatives) is a fool.
That was $1m that could have been spent a lot more constructively.
So far, nobody has figured out what the implications will be when laser-tolerant mosquitoes evolve (and they will!) - while, in the mean time, everyone has discarded their mosquito netting in favour of these new-fangled laser walls.
Nature has a funny way of biting us in the ass when we least expect it.
"Go away before I replace your job with a very small shell script."
...simply because OS X is (for now!) the least dumbed-down commercial option available.
I don't count Linux as an option, because I use professional office and design software that doesn't run on Linux. However, I have noticed that the disease is spreading - Gnome 3 and KDE 4 are notable examples of dumbed-down interfaces that I want absolutely nothing to do with.
For now, anyway...
The problem is, I have seen a lot of this sort of behaviour - screwing up a perfectly good user interface, and designing systems for bigger and bigger idiots. I do not want my desktop to end up looking like someone's mind map diagram.
Microsoft is also guilty - as is the KDE project. To be honest, the fact that Apple has been the least guilty party in this regard (at least as far as OS X is concerned) is tempered by the fact that I think they're scum and hate their guts. :)
With tongue firmly in cheek, I want a user interface that is like a Yorkie bar: It's not for girls.
This is pretty tame. I remember the Monochrome Internet BBS allowed you to select one of four sexes:
1) Male
2) Female
3) Unknown
4) Confused
...but to my disappointment, Microsoft hasn't quite managed to hit the mark.
My idea was the "pre-compiling" of a kernel runtime environment (everything from the ready list to device drivers would be pre-initialised from a file at boot time) - and this file would be updated every time you added a driver or installed an operating system patch. This would happen as part of the *installation* process, for that driver or patch - not something that just required a reboot and a boot via the "old and slow" way. The boot process would actually *require* this pre-compilation process to be carried out - and the system would not boot without this data (in much the same way that it won't boot without a boot block.)
When you installed the OS from CD/DVD/USB/network/tape/whatever, the installer would scan for devices. If you wanted to add a new temporary device (say, a USB storage device), the driver would simply be loaded at runtime. But if it was something non-removable, like a graphics card, the installer or OS (whatever detected the hardware) would invoke a "kernel startup recompilation". This could be initialised in an OS-controlled virtual machine instance, and the kernel data extracted for compression and dumping to disk.
What Microsoft has here is a slightly smarter version of Hibernate - nothing more - and it still requires the user to slow-boot on occasion, rather than handle the pre-compiling of the kernel data while the OS is still up.
Pretty much any 8-bit (save for a few Research Machines Z80-based beasts that actually DID boot from disk or network) had a usable, working operating system up within about a second of hitting the power switch.
Whether you chose to load an *application* from tape or disk at that point is irrelevant. The OS was ready, and had booted. That's the point - not application loading times, or the speed of attached storage.
I personally think the most honest businessman in IT was Jack Tramiel - he described business as war, and didn't mince his words. Larry Ellison also gets props in my book for being a ruthless, capitalist businessman with an eye for profit, shareholder value - and complete domination.
I don't even think Google's Larry and Sergei are dishonest - I just think they were very naïve about how business really worked when they started Google - and made all sorts of wishy-washy ethical mission statements before discovering that they had entered a dog-eat-dog world, where nice companies wind up dead.
A while ago I read about SHA-1 hashes being a lot easier to defeat with altered data, so it was with raised eyebrows that I noticed the entire checksumming system in git was based on SHA1, with absolutely no backup (it would have been trivial to have a trio of checksums for each object in the repository - one SHA1/512, one MD5 and one HMAC - with a CRC64 appended, just for good measure. The likelihood of defeating one hash is unlikely but possible - but defeating all four? A lot less likely!)
My guess is that something has been submarined into the Linux code base, and the respective files have been tweaked to ensure that the SHA1 hash matches. I would not be surprised if hackers have been researching how to plant the code and working on the hashes in their own time (maybe with GPU or FPGA), before they actually broke into the systems at kernel.org. There's no reason they couldn't have done this - Linux is open source, after all.
However, due to a SHA1 being the be-all and end-all in git, there is absolutely no protection against an attack of this kind - because SHA1 hashes are assumed to be infallible. That's simply bad design. It's my guess that a line-by-line analysis is going to be required, with a lot of poring over diffs of backups and kernel code that's been submitted since the earliest deduced break-in.
If they're lucky, the hackers may not have doctored the backups, too...
I never saw the point of Gnome 3: If I wanted pain, I'd scratch my own eyes out with sandpaper.
I'm just glad it's not just me. Since Windows Vista and 7 (not to mention the abominable ribbon on Office 2007/2010), I was under the distinct impression that UI technology was going retrograde.
...is the cost of an annual subscription to a VPN provider.
Of course, if you go via the VPN route, you can also view other UK content remotely - not just BBC stuff.
Many modern devices offer native VPN client functionality, which is just the ticket for fooling iPlayer into thinking your IP address is in Britain.
I would expect even a missile to have private/public authentication with an abort code.
Never trust security - especially not your own. Always assume that something may be cracked at a later stage.
Yeah, but then you have to manage open source.
Out of the frying pan, and into the fire...
My wife works for the German civil service, and according to her, the pay there is also crap. But it's not all quite so cut-and-dried.
There are plenty of people working for the German civil service who are, actually, quite happy - despite earning €25-35K. The main reason for this is that they have a different system of employment - once you have been offered a position as beamter, it is practically impossible to lose your job.
(Of course, it's not impossible, but the costs involved in getting rid of a beamter mean they're practically bulletproof to all intents and purposes.)
This means, essentially, that you trade salary for job security. This isn't just a benefit for you in terms of peace of mind, either - it's actually a valuable benefit if you ever apply for a mortgage, because your low-risk status is officially recognised, and it gets you a cheaper interest rate.
However, working for the UK civil service offers you zip in the way of job security or actual benefits, beyond the warm glow of actually getting the Queen's birthday and half of Maundy Thursday off. If some beancounter bleats about costs, you can still be axed - just as easily as anyone in the private sector - and you'll still be out on your ear.
Then there's living costs: My wife and I pay 664 euros per month for a nice flat (~60 square metres / ~646 square feet) in a good area of Duesseldorf, with excellent access to public transport. (It's so good, in fact, that we gave up on car ownership in 2009 and saved ourselves a packet.) Unlimited public transport in the city will cost you 65 euros per month. If you had to live on a civil service salary, you could still be left with more than half your income - after tax. The bottom line is that you can live a reasonable life on a low salary, here.
But the UK? You have no reasonable public transport, other than in London, which is so expensive that it makes Tokyo look like a bargain. Your road system stinks, and running a car in the UK is getting prohibitively expensive. You'd also be lucky to rent a room in a shared house for what you could get a whole flat for in Germany.
This is why I think GCHQ are stark, staring bonkers if they actually expect anyone intelligent to come and work for them for £35k, a pat on the back, and a few extra days of leave (which you can't do anything with anyway - because you'll be so skint that you'll be staying at home.)
a) Pay was laughably crap - I could get an awful contract at way below my market rate and still earn more than double what GCHQ would pay me.
b) I had a problem with DV clearance - not because I feared the vetting process or what it entailed, but because it would require me to give up any non-British citizenship. Frankly, I was not prepared to do that. I've had to be cleared to SC on multiple occasions, which doesn't require me to give up my other citizenships, and I'm totally fine with that.
c) To work for GCHQ means living in Britain - and to be honest, I have developed a taste for living in first-world countries. To cut a long story short, Britain isn't the kind of place where I'd consider settling down.
GCHQ is going to find that if it wants to retain people who are capable of fighting against the cybergeeks of Russia and China, it needs to recognise that the skills and experience it's asking for have a market rate attached, and the salary they are offering wouldn't be accepted by a toilet cleaner in some countries I know of - let alone any serious IT professional with experience (which in turn, usually means a wife, kids and other commitments that won't be paid for on a measly £35k per year.)
Or, on the other hand, GCHQ is going to have to come to terms with the fact that it won't be a player for much longer.
I made some pretty weird cables in my time - including a Commodore 64 user port - parallel port cable, for PC/Amiga/C64 transfers with a custom driver I wrote.
Nothing quite beats the feeling of coming home with a bag full of components from Maplin (back when they really did sell components, rather than the PC stuff they sell today), firing up the soldering iron on the kitchen table - and filling those little D-Sub buckets with shiny, molten solder...
Memories...
That's a real pity.
But given that everything is increasingly moving to Linux, Windows Server or AIX, who REALLY cares if Solaris 11 doesn't run on old SPARC iron?
...your reason sounds so frightfully plausible that I wouldn't actually be SURPRISED if the RAF issued a press release, saying that for the next rematch, they will wrap their delicate little pilots in cotton wool - and issue them all with bras, just to be on the safe side.
(You never know.)
I expect the PAF pilots are enjoying a well-earned curry and a chuckle.
You bring air power to bear, not bare!
Read more books.
They can't manage anyone - not even themselves.
With luck, the virus writers will soon join them, and viruses/malware will only be supported on Vista and 7.
That's wishful thinking for you!
I feel I am qualified to comment on this, seeing as my wife is German.
The important thing for Brits to understand is that while you are always ready for a joke or witticism, most Germans are not. They don't understand British humour because they are not in a state of mind to enjoy it, and often think of British humour as either overly dull (in the case of a sarcastic comment about your kids' good behaviour) or (in the case of stuff like Monty Python), hopelessly silly. That being said, I *do* know a few Germans who love Monty Python, just as I know a few English people who utterly despise it.
For most Germans, there is a time and a place for jokes. That is usually with friends, or people you know fairly well. With strangers, it tends to go down like a lead balloon, on most occasions. That is probably why most Brits, eager to tickle Deutschland's funnybone, have come back with the erroneous impression that the nation of beer and premium car marques has about as much a sense of humour as the Borg collective.
Even other nations have fallen into the trap of seeing Germans as humourless bits of meat on two legs: A colleague from the Netherlands was convinced that my German boss had no sense of humour, and was actually scared to crack a joke with him. (It did not help that my boss happened to dress very professionally all the time - it made him look like an FBI agent.) But he was quite happy to crack (or enjoy) a joke with most of the German office staff.
But then again, the Dutch are a different crowd: When I went to work for a well-known Dutch bank in Amsterdam in 2008, the team leader asked me where I was from. When I replied that I lived in Germany, he snapped his heels together, saluted me dramatically and exclaimed "Heil Hitler!" Yes, this was a bank. Yes, these were grown men. But then again, the Dutch sense of humour is, shall we say ... robust.
