Posts by Steven Raith

Hell, I'd be happy with RAID1 in my 2 bay NAS....it's still 15tb, which is plenty good enough for the girls I go out with.

Steven R

Re: Stasi on steroids

Which is great, until 'excessive use of encryption technology' is enshrined into law as 'reasonable suspicion of cyber-terrorism' (or whatever they think will get through - terrorism, paedophilia, any other 'indefensible' argument) on the back of these regulations, and used as an excuse to kick in doors and confiscate equipment.

That sort of thing actually already happens, it just requires a bit more pretence at the moment - IE false accusations of hacking, etc - as right now, just Encrypting. Fucking. Everything. can't be used in and of itself as suspicion of a crime. It can certainly be used to bolster the case to get a warrant against you though, if the motivations are strong enough with the right people.

People say we're sleepwalking into a surveillance state, my reaction to the above (as that's pretty much what happened to them) suggests we've been there for a while, frankly.

Steven R

Re: I won't believe it

massivelySerial - upvote for an utterly bob-on Count Duckula reference.

"Blood..?"

"I'LL GET IT!!"

Steven "Things never run to plan for...DUCKULA" R.

Re: FBI vs Apple

Apple and Google might snoop your data for profit, but they can't lock you up without trial.

Add that to the fact that the FBI and other TLAs haven't been above corruption - including the fabrication of evidence in cases involving the fucking death penalty - in the past when it suits their agenda, and can lock you up without trial, and I think you'll find that your argument doesn't really defend your point of view as well as you think it does.

Steven R

Re: Enabled Macros?

.....and users shouldn't be opening unsolicited attachments.

The problem isn't the macros, it's poor user training as much as it is the greed of the malware writers. Stupid is as stupid does.

Steven R

Dept Of Bleeding Obvious.

(sorry, but someone had to point that out, and I'm grumpy tonight)

Re: I think DX2 was with the coprocessor

Ah yes, that all makes more sense - I've not thought about 486 tech classes for over fifteen years, so excuse my brainfarts.

Steven R

Re: To be fair ...

"I'm getting rosewood, I'm getting heavy industry fallout, I'm getting the smell of the ones and zeroes escaping in a pall of blue smoke....I'm getting a strange, burning feeling in my legOH SH-"

I think I'll give high power USB a miss till it's matured, somewhat. Thankfully, I'm utterly skint so that's not really a problem at the moment.

Steven "gizza job, mate?" R

Re: I visited Dounreay in 1979 and nearly got a job there

It would have been significantly quieter, you'd have had lots of free time from the lack of things to do (unless you have a real yearning to look at heather) and you'd be annoyed at the fact that it was a two hour drive to what most people would describe as actual civilization, with multiplex cinemas and, gasp, dual carriageway roads.

As I've noted elsewhere though, I still have a soft spot for it, despite having worked in Central London and York. London and York have history, but the far north of scotland felt like it was living history in some respects.

I'm sort of tempted to go back up there for a weekend sometime, find out who has got married to who and see if the same auld numpties are still living in the same villiages....

We'll see.

Steven "Thrumster" R

Re: Aaaw...

I thankyouverymuch for appreciating the rare moment when I actually make any sense, arf.

Re: Power

Ah, you see I just used common sense and assumed power off was the safer option!

I'm hoping my next career move means not dealing with consumer/SMB grade UPSs, but handy to know.

Cheers!

Steven R

Re: Nice.

Well, they've already used HBM1 memory on the Fury GPUs (Which is why they're restricted to 4Gb per package) so I'd expect to see this on the next gen GPUs and possibly a lighter implementation being used as a 'slow' cache on Zen based APUs.

I'm not sure if that much cache would make a huge difference on a straight CPU? At least, not as dramatic a difference as a on a GPU/CPU combo where the GPU can utilise it as VRAM, allowing significantly chunkier games (And GPU accelerated apps) to be played without a discrete GPU - so good for gaming laptops perhaps? Anyone got any educated opinions?

Steven R

Re: The more they push

"It's worked properly in Hyper-V since Server 2012 / Windows 8. Yes Remote FX does count as it does a similar thing. However Hyper-V also supports SR-IOV, which is IOMMU on steroids...."

With off the shelf software like Windows 7/8/10 Home edition and a basic HyperV server install, yeah?

No, didn't think so. Software Assurance and Enterprise Edition required, yeah?

Re: Linux & Games

There's been a steady trickle of AAA games getting native ports - anything by Croteam, we've recently had good ports of Bioshock Infinite, and here's a general list that I found on Reddit:

Metro 2033 Redux

Metro: Last Light (altough you can't buy this anymore)

Metro: Last Light Redux

Serious Sam 3

The Talos Principle

Civilization Beyond Earth

Cities: Skylines

Half-Life (all of them)

Counter Strike (all of them)

Natural Selection 2

Brütal Legend

Spec Ops: The line

Borderlands: The pre-Sequel

Portal 1 and 2

Tropico 5

Empire: Total war

Shadow Warrior

Outlast

Team Fortress 2

XCOM: Enemy Unkown and Enemy WIthin

Dead Island

Dying light

That's an oldish list, so add to that Arkham Knight (should arrive in Spring), Project Cars 2 (they promised Linux for PCars1 but that never happened, the cheeky little shits - linux (and Wii) users funded them on a promise, suppose that's what pre-order/crowdfunding culture gets you - but PCars2 will apparently be more platform agnostic to avoid this in future), and almost all the major, wide spectrum (IE not just inhouse, like Frostbite mainly is) engines are either capable of producing linux-native output (Cryengine (Yes, the latest one), Unreal Engine 4, Unity, Source 2 is a given and will likely be one of the first engines to be linux optimised, not just compatible) or are getting lots of attention from the likes of Feral studios, who are porting the games over on behalf of the primary publisher. As more engines get an option to compile directly to linux, it should be less of the 'port' and more of the 'version', if you catch my drift.

As ever, chicken and egg, though. If they don't make the games, we can't buy 'em, but if we don't buy 'em, they won't make 'em....

Steven R

Re: I've read all these messages and...

I'd guess a global/root certificate in the base image on the machine used to decrypt or something similar? Honestly, I've never looked into this sort of thing that hard, but this is what riled people over the Lenovo (and was it Dell?) spyware shenanigans.

Anyone else got a better solution? I suppose it's not impossible that this was long enough ago where Yahoo IM wasn't HTTPS'd, which might not have been that long ago.

Forgive me if I'm reading that wrong, I've been up for over 24 hours, arf.

Steven R

Re: Typo in cache size...

Indeed, I thought I must have missed a few steps in HDD tech recently before checking meself!

For shame, El Reg, for shame! *slaps wrist campily*

Steven R

Re: I know it's NYE and you all want to go home, but really..

Re that PSU, that sounds like it'd be just over wholesale price, and at that price, I'll put that £12 on it not having GPU aux rails dedicated on the PSU.

It'll be fine for an office machine without dedicated graphics - something running an APU or a anything up to a midrange I5 by itself.

But not, I'd not put it in my machine (2xHDD, 1xSSD, R9 280, A8-3870, 16gb RAM). I'd probably trust it in my secondary box used for VMs (Phenom II 920, 8gb RAM, 1xHDD, no dedicated graphics, just onboard Nvidia 7600 or similar).

In all honesty though, if I had the spare wonga, a decent Seasonic or similar decent brand PSU (current is a 550w BeQuiet one in the A8-3870 box - this one) would be preferred, primarily because I like modular wiring and dedicated rails, even if I'm not using them - makes swapping out dead PSUs much less stressful. You know, providing you can find the modular cables five years down the line...

Steven R

Re: What about Ian Murdock

[Editor's note: This article was written and edited before the death of Debian founder Ian Murdock this week.]

I'll assume that was added after the article was published, rather than that you (and at the last count, eight others) lack reading skillz :-)

Steven R

Also a useful and entertaining way to test an internet connection, Flash, and to show someone new to the internet what they could expect.

Good times.

Steven R

Re: It's not just their website

Fun fact - Radio 4 being knocked off the airwaves for more than a set period (I believe 72hrs) without explanation is one of the triggers to unleash Trident.

No, seriously.

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/01/02/radio-4s-nuclear-safety-secrets-you-wont-believe-whats-in-the-airwaves/

A very British way to conduct war,

Steven R

Re: Doubtful

To be fair, if you've arranged a hot date, and arrive in lycra cycle gear - unless you're built like an Adonis, then that's doomed to failure.

Steven "Doesn't wear lycra because no-one wants to see a badly made balloon hippopotamus" R

Re: Somebody went shopping at Argos and it wasn't me

Here's the official statement - unless you made a purchase and enterted your details on Steam during the timeframe of the incident, no details, period, would have been leaked. And even then, the details would have been minimal at worst.

"On December 25th, a configuration error resulted in some users seeing Steam Store pages generated for other users. Between 11:50 PST and 13:20 PST store page requests for about 34k users, which contained sensitive personal information, may have been returned and seen by other users.

The content of these requests varied by page, but some pages included a Steam user’s billing address, the last four digits of their Steam Guard phone number, their purchase history, the last two digits of their credit card number, and/or their email address. These cached requests did not include full credit card numbers, user passwords, or enough data to allow logging in as or completing a transaction as another user.

If you did not browse a Steam Store page with your personal information (such as your account page or a checkout page) in this time frame, that information could not have been shown to another user."

My emphasis. Because that's how caching works.

Does that excuse the snafu? Nope. Does it mean it's likely Steam is the cause of your card fraud? No, to a laughable degree, no. Get the cops to actually check your local petrol station for skimming devices, rather than just asking them if they've had reports of them, because that's - worryingly - more likely to be the case.

It's also likely that they saw the Steam shenigans and thought "Hey, if we use those deets now, they'll blame in on Steam!". Or it could just be coincidence.

Steven R

I'd be out with a shotgun if I saw someone humping my wife, too.

Sorry.

Steven "Not married, and with jokes like that, not likely to be any time soon" R

" That said him saying someone should cut the brake lines or put something in the coffee of the ARM guys publicly was a bridge too far."

"Ok. I still really despise the absolute incredible sh*t that is non-discoverable buses, and I hope that ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident. DT only does so much.

So if you see any, send them my love, and possibly puncture the brake-lines on their car and put a little surprise in their coffee, ok?"

Yeah, totally sounds like he's calling for someone to actually try to kill someone.

No, sorry, sounds like hyperbole. My mistake!

Steven R

Re: Goooooooo Bill

"That depends if the design of the vehicle / controls contributed to the accident doesn't it? If you couldn't see the dog because the driver's position had poor visibility, or because the brakes took too long to respond then yes Ford would have some blame to share for the accident"

No. A thousands times, no.

My car has wide a-pillars, and the brakes aren't hugely assisted.

I get around this by leaning around the cabin a bit to see entries to junctions (to mitigate my blind spot where the A-pillars are from a normal seated position) and by pressing the brake pedal harder then you would in, say, a new Corsa.

As the driver, it's *my* responsibility to know how to use my car safely and to *not* drive it if I feel that's not possible. Nobody elses.

Steven R

Ah, found a few of those in my recently deceased dads flat (he did maintenance work on industrial ventilation systems like what you find in paint factories etc).

I now know what they are - nice!

Steven R

Car spotting!

It's not a Rover 600, it's a Cadillac Seville which has a vaguely similar profile to a Rover 600.

They were available in the Uk for a short time, but being late 90s US built cars, they were even worse put together than a Rover 600, which is saying something.

That, and a front wheel drive V8 isn't really what UK buyers were looking for, because our roads have corners in 'em - a transverse mounted V8 driving the front wheels ain't a recipe for a pointy front end. Suffice to say the Uk car press ridiculed them endlessly.

I can understand the confusion though, at a glance they aren't dissimilar, but if you look at the roofline/door shuts towards the rear and front of the car there are clear differences - and the headlights on the Rover 600 don't wrap around as far.

Cadillac Seville of the correct era: Clicky for piccy

Rover 600 from similar angle: Clicky for piccy

The scene featuring the car in the episode occurs at 52min 30secs on iPlayer, should you want to compare and contrast. I can easily believe it being simpler to shoot the scene in the US than it would be to try to find a Seville in a presentable state in the UK, too.

I've always found the fact that they tried to sell the Seville over here to be an oddity, which is why I recognise them when I see them. That, and I'm a major car geek.

Steven R

Re: I smell a pork barrel. ..

To be fair, the idea of herding the cats that are the major Govt depts that you pay things to is a terrifying one; I say this having worked in local and national govt IT depts across a couple of different fields.

GDS is starting to level out and have a proper crack at stuff; the very worst case scenario is that it all goes just as poorly as other major Govt IT projects.

Best case, they do a DirectGov and actually manage to bludgeon there way through the departments involved and get them to do something other than lining their own pockets with their own backwards, non-interoperable systems.

I mean, jesus, even if they get a common backend, and everyone still 'runs' their own little fiefdom, it'd be a start.

Steven "likes to be optimistic as there are now, at least, some fairly bright, savvy people in Govt IT again, unlike a decade ago" R

Re: The problem is not Dell (or Lenovo) hardware

"If this were to happen and you ring Tech Support to say "my system is not working" the techies will say "OK, let's install the factory supplied software. Right, now does that work?" "Yes then I'm sorry sir/madam, but this is a software problem." If a Dell engineer (sub-contracted to Unisys in my experience) were to come down to fix your hardware at your premises then they would do exactly the same thing."

This. Exactly this.

Steven R