Posts by Mark Solaris 48 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Nov 2013
I get that sometimes when doing the allow-reload-allow-reload-allow cycle of the uMatrix incremental permission process to play media on some cross domain whored up affiliate TV station site. Usually the DRM stuff wants you to give a wide-on into your cabbage patch before you can watch a thirty second segment which was on youtube the whole time.
But usually I'm beligerent. Or I'll fire up Qubes and have a fresh browser VM each time which gets discarded after the media has played.
We had a Cyber mainframe at uni, and the process for signing up to it was to use your student number, date of birth and full name to authenticate. Of course the CS dept employee (an introverted grumpy bastard - very BOFH) left the data file readable in his home directory briefly so we scored a copy quick smart and had unlimited accounts, (cpu quotas, disk space etc) for years.
The dodgiest part was one day I decided to print it out to have a hard copy, just in case. At the time we had huge fast drum printers and an Operators room where you went to collect your print jobs. That day the employee in question was staffing the print out desk and I watched with dreaded fascination as he went down the stack of printouts (1/2 meter tall usually), flicking back the cover sheet with our student numbers and fanning down to the next one to seperate out each job. My all-students-in-the-uni print job was about 20cm high, and to this day I don't know how he didn't ken to the fact that it was that particular file from his home directory I'd just printed. It was a phenomenal waste of paper which you'd at least glance at the contents to see why someone had 800 pages of output.
Getting away with that in that fashion has always been one of the funniest memories from that institution, and it leveraged a lot of shenanigans for years on end. The students had the keys to the kingdom and we damn well used them.
As the maintainer of the Solaris Package Archive http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/sparc/ I've been blessed to use every single Solaris version on SPARC and x86. I find that it's harder to get businesses to run Solaris as 1) Oracle pricing sucks and 2) the free versions don't have a support infrastructure worth a damn so managers can't justify the risk.
It's a shame to see OmniOS disappear, I can't say I've run it myself, I don't have the infrastructure to set up the labs.
BTW if anyone wants to donate machine access I then can continue to build newer packages etc. I'm serious. Currently my hardware access is limited and not stable enough to warrant investing the time to set up 10 and 11 LDOMs/Zones and 8 and 9 guest Zones etc. ta++
Tesla is one of the automotive companies that are actually developing the technology. Developing means adjusting and refining and enhancing. One of those enhancements is to step away from a part manufacturer that isn't on board with their direction. Another enhancement, due to arrive imminently, is to add heavier restrictions to the Autopilot, insisting on the drivers hands being on the wheel much more, even going as far as requiring the car to be stopped and in Park before it'll allow the Autopilot to be re-engaged. This will catch the idiots that don't read manuals, are too arrogant to follow the rules and then rush for a lawyer when they cause an accident from using the vehicle the wrong way.
Splitting all the hairs...
The JCSAT-14 F9-024 is an orbital class rocket, it goes sideways to actually put things in orbit. The Blue Origin New Shepard is sub-orbital... it goes straight up and falls back again... of limited use except for tourists.
This isn't the first time a returned orbital booster has been re-fires, the OG2 flight in December was re-fired within a few days at the Cape, to validate it and prove the point. It was a short duration static fire.
He means when you sort it, the dates are displayed in chronological order... because 2016-03-10 is alphabetically (ASCII) greater than 2016-03-09. You can't do that with MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MMM/YYYY etc.
Using YYYY-MM-DD in log file names is a very useful thing.
In a former life I would have my work VPN running on a dedicated machine, and then route to the corporate network IP ranges through it. You could have several VPNs running to access many networks, as well as one for a default route to the Internet. It requires it's own device but they are pretty cheap. Doing it on a VM on the same box is asking for interoperability trouble.
The requirement is the VPN host has to be allowed to talk to local devices... obstensively to print but in this case for many machines to route over its tunnel.
I'm rather "bugger the cost, just do it" when it's Good Things* that are being invested in. Cheap rockets, electric cars, fiber to the premises, electrical storage and peak load reduction; they are all part of the solution and a hell of a lot smarter to subsidize than mining company fuel bills or oil sands exploration.
*I'm more than happy to decide for everyone when it's a Good Thing or not :)
If the government offered you $1000 to buy a new machine to wordprocess your articles, I would judge you harshly if you ignored the money and limited your future ability to research articles better because you were short on cash. You write a lot of financial articles http://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/1692 and you should be able to recognise good business acumen when you see it.
Cell tracking of my phone would be the worst, it'd show my propensity to show up to work 90 minutes late, spend decaminutes in the disabled loo playing games on my tablet and also excessively frequenting the coffee shop with the phwooooaaaarr blonde behind the counter. Also considering my green credentials, the amount of time I spend driving my stinking diesel 4WD dinosaur around Sydney is kind of embarrassing :) Definitely blackmail material!
On the topic of carriers and GSM et al, currently we have millions of phone SIMs on the carrier networks. If the billions of devices on the IoT had a SIM you'd need to pick a different addressing scheme than phone numbers (IPv6?) and upgrade the capacity of the base stations to cope with several magnitudes more devices. You can already see them creaking now when standing on a busy train station with 100's of devices trying to log on at once.
I suspect the no photographing has to do with the taboo on Aboriginies appearing in photographs, it's against their culture to view images of dead people. Our TV stations have warnings before programs that persons of Aboriginal descent appear in them, in case that person has died etc. Also we're not supposed to name a dead Aboriginal person, you have to say Mr Smith, instead of their full name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_avoidance_practices
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