* Posts by Adrian Harvey

158 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2009

Page:

Toyota admits its engines are overrated – by its own power testing software

Adrian Harvey
Headmaster

Re: ディーゼルゲート

Not really a translation- if you say those characters aloud, the sounds ‘Dieselgate’ come out your mouth! That character set too is the one mainly used for foreign loan words.

Though as various -gate scandals have nothing to do with gates, and Watergate had nothing to do with water I’m not sure which way you would chose to translate this anyway. Perhaps Japan has another naming scheme for scandals entirely? If so, perhaps we could borrow it! I’m tired of -gate already…

Only one more use of -gate should be tolerated- when Mr Musk messes up we have to have an Elongate!

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

Adrian Harvey

Re: Pointless if potless

Standard US sockets, cables are 15A, so at 110V that’s ~1600W max kettle power. In the UK kettles are mostly 3000W so boil water in about half the time it takes in the US.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any - but they are less popular. Also, stove-top kettles are more common than in the UK - stoves have lots more power (or may be gas)

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Adrian Harvey

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

> Michelangelo was an artist, the pope who hired him obviously couldnt paint or sculpt...

Fascinatingly - Michaelangelo signed every one of the letters (progress reports, etc) he sent to the pope as "Michaelangelo, sculptor" (source: audio guide in the Cistine Chapel) as he didn't really want to do the painting! Carving things was his preferred work.

I wonder if that actually makes the management in this case smart? - they got amazing work that might not have been done had the worker just been left to his own preferences....

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Adrian Harvey
Happy

Re: Ad blockers exist... because...

Yes! I remember reading that in the 90's - great book and increasingly relevant. I think of Chicken Little whenever I hear about the developments in artificial/cultured meats.

After nine servers he worked on failed, techie imagined next career as beach vendor

Adrian Harvey
Boffin

Re: Aaahhhh, eDirectory.

I was betting on a stuck obituary.

No, no, no! Disco joke hit bum note in the rehab center

Adrian Harvey

It’s actually an extract from a guitar piece called Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. Though that itself may contain references to earlier work by Chopin.

See https://thenextweb.com/news/where-did-that-nokia-theme-tune-really-come-from

Some other detail is contained in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_tune

Resilience is overrated when it's not advertised

Adrian Harvey

Re: Data General and EMC

Is symcli the one where the “commands” are all just hex codes? I remember seeing the engineers use that on an EMC Symmetrix a long time ago, it seemed like an awful way to work. Very stable and great support, but not easy to make changes on.

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Adrian Harvey
Trollface

Re: Thanks El Reg...

"while I was washing up in the restroom"

Wait! You were cleaning your dishes in the toilet?!? Or have I mistranslated *your* jargon?

Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file

Adrian Harvey
Alert

Re: Years ago....

It’s all very well until you remove the call centre’s IVR prompts which happen to be in mp3 format too. </voice of experience >

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

Adrian Harvey

Re: 'A reader we’ll Regomize as "Leif"'

I presume he worked for Ericsson?

Or at least used their equipment?

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Adrian Harvey

Re: Sun box

I wish the keyboard-based hub was common too! But the USB standard makes it tricky - a standard keyboard only has a low speed cable on it (the kind you can’t buy - they must be moulded to the device). And a hub would need high speed as the downstream interface might be connected to anything…. And to take that further - what happens when someone plugs in something other than a mouse to that port - say a USB drive? And it goes slow…

Now I’m wondering what a keyboard&mouse set would be like if the mouse was hard wired to the keyboard and only one cable to the PC…

Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac

Adrian Harvey

Re: Universal... what?

I always liked the touch that there were in fact 2 kinds of cables, low speed and high speed. But you were not allowed to sell low speed cables….

Because low speed cables were only allowed where they were permanently moulded into the device using them (for example, a mouse, or a keyboard).

Most of the advantages of having a cheaper, lower spec cable for the things that only need slow speed. None of the consumer confusion!

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Adrian Harvey

Wasn’t the SUN logo readable is all (4) rotations? Or was there an earlier logo that wasn’t?

BOFH takes a visit to retro computing land

Adrian Harvey

Re: NMOC

I told my kids that joke when I found an old 3.5” floppy in the attic - my daughter’s reaction was ‘what’s a save icon?’ Growing up in an age of Google Docs and the like she had never seen or used a save icon. That means to some kids even knowing what a save icon is makes you ‘old’. So actual floppy disks are 2 ‘generations’ back I guess….

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Adrian Harvey
Boffin

Re: Ah, the good'ol days..

( note : for the US people it's 56K not 64. )

Not strictly true - the US B channel standard was still 64 bit, but they stole 1 bit from every 6th byte to use for signalling. Giving 62.666kbps. Ok for voice where the loss of the least significant bit from the occasional byte was imperceptible, but, as you know, if you can’t sync with the stream to know which bits will be robbed, you wind up having to treat every byte as 7-bit and you max out at 56k usable. .

Dev's code manages to topple Microsoft's mighty SharePoint

Adrian Harvey

Re: Buffer overflow DoS attack.

Ok, pedantic mode on…

“ even 0xF0000 to 0xFFFFF was reserved in some boxes.”

0xFFFF0 had to be reserved at the very least as the intel 8086 processor used it as the bootstrap address on power up - it generally contained little more than a jump to the real startup routines, but it had to be there. One of the defined methods for rebooting a PC was to JMP FFFF:0000 (segmented addressing = 0xFFFF0). See Intel_8086_Overview.pdf

“It is IBM PC HARDWARE DESIGN. If you had more than 640 KB the memory from 0xA0000 to 0xFFFFF the memory was "shifted up" by 384 KB. Still remember himem.sys or EMS?”

IBM maybe, but not the PC - the PC could only address 1MB. So it couldn’t really be “shifted up”. EMS involved “shifting sideways” where a segment of memory would be swapped in and out of the upper address space so you could access more than the 1MB, but not all at once.

BOFH: Tech helps HR investigate the Boss's devices

Adrian Harvey

Re: Inspirational!

In single consent jurisdictions that I know of you still have to be a party to the conversation to record it - so an employer secretly recording would be very clearly illegal as they were not part of the discussion in question.

NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe

Adrian Harvey

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

“ They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.”

The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400. So either way this was just a bug.

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

Adrian Harvey
Boffin

Re: We can do better than 8.3 these days, can't we?

Yes, really! The FAT file system directory table did not include the dot. It had two fixed-length fields, one of 8 characters (the name) and one of 3 characters (the extension). So shorter names were padded with space characters that are ignored. See https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/fs/fat/fat-1.html for details on the file system layout on disk.

How exactly the command line functions and DOS interrupts (function calls) treated those special cases is an interesting question though….

Swooping in to claim the glory while the On Call engineer stands baffled

Adrian Harvey

Discovering that it is impossible *is* the process of elimination

Adrian Harvey

But eliminating something means that you have discovered it to be impossible. You don’t eliminate it whilst it is still possible! And that’s what Holmes meant. Once you have assessed all the possibilities and eliminated all the ones that turn out not to be possible then the one that is left must be the answer even if it feels unlikely.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Adrian Harvey
Big Brother

NZ cabinet used it too

Was mentioned in a press conference on COVID this week. But they explicitly stated that it had not been security cleared for Restricted material, so there were some items they would not be discussing using that system.

'Azure appears to be full': UK punters complain of capacity issues on Microsoft's cloud

Adrian Harvey
Headmaster

Re: Homework

When were you a child? In 1947 there was a Polio epidemic in New Zealand, and all the schools closed for a term (as well as no Cinemas, public meetings, etc). All the children were enrolled in Correspondence School, and the work posted out to them. One of the radio stations was co-opted and and certain lessons were broadcast at fixed times. So, for example Form 3 English might be 10-11 on Wednesdays.

I’m sure the latest tech has made it a little easier, and more interactive, but it has been *possible* for a very long time.

Icon because it’s a teacher... and because I’m being pedantic about the word possible so I can tell my anecdote :-)

Still hoping to run VMware's ESXi on Arm any time soon? Don't hold your breath – no rush and no commitments

Adrian Harvey

Re: Build it and they will come...

I don’t think VMWare uses the “recompile model” at all anymore. That model was only necessary to overcome limitations of the x86 model that not all privileged instructions were trapped when running outside ring 0. Some simply failed or just behaved differently. VMWare rewrote those on code load so they could be emulated. Commentators had been saying for a long time that virtualisation was not possible on x86 due to architecture limitations. And the chip designers didn’t see any demand. Once that loop was closed and the architecture extended, VMWare moved to using the hardware virtualisation as it has higher performance.

I don’t know what happens if you run VMWare on a really old CPU now - it may still have the software virtualisation code lingering somewhere, but I suspect it will just refuse to run....

Anyway, a long way of saying that the original VMWare model is probably not necessary on any other CPU as they have had the benefit of seeing the x86 issues and avoiding them.

Open-source, cross-platform and people seem to like it: PowerShell 7 has landed

Adrian Harvey

I know Powershell syntax is odd in some places, and I'm not very keen on it, but the concept of passing the pipeline around as objects is clever and powerful. It avoids having to re-parse data (and, speaking for myself, often incorrectly or without correctly dealing with all the corner cases.)

Are there actually any other shells that implement this concept? Cross platform too?

Early adopters delighted as Microsoft pulls plug on Mobile Backend as a Service. Haha, only joking – they're fuming

Adrian Harvey

Re: Yea - give me that random stuff

I’m wondering if you’re reading this differently to the rest of us? I think when they say committed to a repository they mean committed to *your* repository. Not all the repositories of your dependencies.

Microsoft's on Edge and you could be, too: Chromium-based browser exits beta – with teething problems

Adrian Harvey
Unhappy

Access to file:// urls

I really hope that the little comment about this as a “security” item isn’t Edge picking up the Chrome model for this where it’s hacked in somewhere low level in the code and doesn’t understand the difference between local file paths (which really are a different domain) and remote file paths (which are just another protocol), nor between corporate controlled web sites (which may even be running on the same box as the file server) and untrusted sites. As a result simple integration between web apps and legacy stuff either fails, becomes complex and a whole new kind of security risk, or forces users onto IE. I’m sure it was done with the best of intentions but Chrome has been causing me nightmares on some recent projects.

IT exec sets up fake biz, uses it to bill his bosses $6m for phantom gear, gets caught by Microsoft Word metadata

Adrian Harvey

Re: Good to stay "anonymous"

Frank Abagnale (he of "Catch Me If You Can") wrote "The Art of the Steal" which is a good easy read on fraud techniques and how to prevent them. A little more focus on cheque fraud than necessary in these days of declining cheque use, but still an entertaining read!

We live so fast I can't even finish this sent...

Adrian Harvey
Coat

Re: Is that...

Blue snow marks trail edges and corners. Sprayed on to improve visibility on foggy days. To be followed rather than avoided if you don’t want to go over the cliff.

Icon: ski jacket.

Beware the three-finger-salute, or 'How I Got The Keys To The Kingdom'

Adrian Harvey
Headmaster

Re: Back in the day...

Pendatic I know, but New Zealand uses the US keyboard layout as dollars are the currency and English the most spoken language.

(Ok, even more pedantic, there is a keyboard setting for Maori language that changes the back-quote key to a macron compose key, but I argue it’s not the “New Zealand” layout )

Icon: closest for pendant

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Adrian Harvey
Flame

Re: Dont have your machine room at the top of a building

I seriously hope it was Halon, not Halogen. Halogens (Flourine, Chlorine, Iodene, etc) are highly reactive and would be an “interesting” choice for a fire control system. Good for the BOFH though, very effective for wrapping up stories.

Icon may well appear on Halogen cylinders.

Attention! Very important science: Tapping a can of fizzy beer does... absolutely nothing

Adrian Harvey

Re: This theory always puzzles me

Divers get the bends because the solubility of a gas increases with pressure (actually partial pressure - that is the pressure of that gas alone). More gas dissolves in the blood stream under he higher pressure at depth, and then tries to suddenly form bubbles as the pressure is released when the diver surfaces,

Very similar to soft drinks, but if is the gas is dissolved there aren’t bubbles, microscopic or otherwise. It is only when the ceases to be dissolved that bubbles form.

Incedentally was the beer warm or cool for the test? The liquid temperature has a significant effect on CO2 solubility that’s why there”s no carbonated tea. (Well, not hot tea)

Battery-guzzling 4K hardware clad in an alloy battle jacket: Lenovo's 4th-gen ThinkPad Yoga X1 is its most metal yet

Adrian Harvey

Magic keyboard gone?

From the photos it looks like the magic keyboard is gone, replaced by an ordinary inset keyboard - is that right?

I have a 3rd gen at work and the keyboard, unlike most other laptops is not set in an indented tray so that the tops of the keys are level with the case and trackpad. Instead the keys all retract when the lid is closed so they do not brush the screen. This helps Lenovo to provide reasonable travel on the keys whilst keeping the machine thin. A much better solution to thinness than the Mac one where the short key travel made the keyboard painful to use (your opinions may vary)

The keys also retracted when in tablet mode which helped you not to type on the back of the computer by mistake as you hold the tablet. I remember the thinkpad butterfly keyboard, so this trick bought back happy memories:-)

Adrian Harvey

Re: F'ing Fn key

I’d like them both to be CTRL and move the Fn function to the caps lock key. Bios doesn’t have a setting for that though and Windows key mapping programs I’ve looked at don’t seem to know about Fn:-(.

IT protip: Never try to be too helpful lest someone puts your contact details next to unruly boxen

Adrian Harvey
Boffin

Re: Where were you 20 years ago?

It generally surprises people to learn that Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are not in fact a form of picture writing. They are in fact a fancy font used for monuments and the like. Each picture maps (roughly) to a syllable and a word is composed of several syllables. A simpler font was used for everyday writing.

It was long assumed to have been word-pictures (like Chinese or emojis). But after the Rosetta Stone unlocked the language this was found to be a misapprehension.

I see your blue passport and raise you a green number plate: UK mulls rewards scheme for zero-emission vehicles

Adrian Harvey

Re: Capitalist pig (green edition)

It really does grow on trees you know!

Tinfoil-hat search engine DuckDuckGo gifts more options, dark theme and other toys for the 0.43%

Adrian Harvey

The country selector really really needs an ‘only from this country’ option, rather than just biasing answers slightly towards your selected country. Sometimes I only want to see results that can actually be delivered without a 4 week delay....

IR35 blame game: Barclays to halt off-payroll contractors, goes directly to PAYE

Adrian Harvey

Re: Personal Service Companies

> Not sure what you mean here.

> Assuming you mean raising corp tax levels?

I wasn’t suggesting anything about the level - it’s a few years since I lived there and I don’t know what the current UK rate is!

However I understand that UK dividends are taxed at a low rate separately from the Corp tax paid on the profit, and the poster I was replying to was suggesting fixing that by eliminating Corp tax.

The system in NZ taxes the dividends as Income at the same rate as any other Income you may have. The Corp tax that has been paid is offset against that tax amount owing when the dividend is paid (the process is called imputation) and any additional Income tax still owing is deducted as the dividend is paid.

There are a few corner cases that are dealt with in the tax return and there’s no equivalent to National Insurance in NZ - so that would add complexity, but as a system it’s much fairer, more consistent and harder to exploit than the UK one.

Adrian Harvey

Re: Personal Service Companies

1. is not completely necessary - you could simply allow corporation tax paid as a credit against the income tax payable. This is what is done in Australia and New Zealand ( they call it imputation tax credits). Doing it that way prevents tax optimisation by means of withholding the dividend- the Corp tax is still paid and only the step up to income tax rates is held back until the dividend is released.

Pro tip: Plug in your Tesla S when clocking off, lest you run out of juice mid hot pursuit

Adrian Harvey

Not per driver, perhaps, but one “hot spare” in the pool wouldn’t be beyond reason. It’s not unlikely that one would be needed to cover mechanical issues, crash repair time, service intervals, etc.

Has outsourcing public-sector IT worked? The Institute for Government seems to think so, kinda

Adrian Harvey
FAIL

To be fair...

To be fair you would have to compare with the success/failure rate before outsourcing which, given the record for large government IT projects probably gives the outsourcing camp a low bar to jump over.

Icon - for the projects!

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

Adrian Harvey

Re: "they haven't found out a way to make a zoom lens flat enough to fit in the phone yet."

Not counting the two that (almost) everyone has :-)

Adrian Harvey
Headmaster

Re: Not even parity

Assuming we’re talking about the pro, you’ve got the tax calculation wrong. GBP 1049 inc VAT is GBP 874.17 ex VAT (at 20%). I think you may have taken 20% off rather than reversing out the 20% added on perhaps?

Making it US$1080 at the current cross rate. I suppose 8% more is not the end of the world, and it won’t cover your airfare to go over to a sales-tax free state and buy one - but still annoying!

Maths pedant rather than grammar - but I’m sticking with that icon even though it guarantees I will have made an error in my post too!

Mainstream auto makers stuff in more self-driving tech: 8% of new Euro cars have Level 2 smarts

Adrian Harvey
Stop

Re: Level 2 smarts ?

> (yes it is legal, although not very smart, to do 60 along those lanes).

It was pointed out to me, many years ago, that the speed limit is not the only law that limits your speed. Charges such as dangerous driving, and the parts of the Highway Code to do with stopping distance apply too. It is very likely to be illegal to do 60 on said lanes. Just not a breach of the speed limit regulations.

Sadly there seems to be an increasing trend around here to treat the speed limit as an indicator of road quality, and assume all parts of a given road are traverseable at its speed limit...

Icon because it’s the only road sign on offer =======>

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Adrian Harvey
Coffee/keyboard

Re: Why is there a choice?

> Hey! Where's the ANY key ?

It's the big blank one with no letters on it.

The in and outs of Microsoft's new Windows Terminal

Adrian Harvey

I expect there are quite a few of us, but what bothers me is that I thought how clever curses / ncurses was - a library designed to give you api based access to the screen and hide all the termcap/info mess. We seem to be full circle somehow...

However, having a protocol for remote display / network transparency of terminal apps is a good thing. I hadn’t realised some of the remote access services were scraping hidden console windows to make some apps remotely accessible.

Flight Simulator 2020: Exciting new ride or a doomed tailspin in a crowded market?

Adrian Harvey

Re: Physics

Possibly - the Venturi effect and the Bernoulli principle are related. Roughly speaking, Venturi observed the effect, Bernoulli did the maths.

Adrian Harvey
Facepalm

Re: Physics

Before criticising others’ understanding of Aerodynamics it’s a good idea to make sure your facts are correct. The venturi principle [sic] has little to do with wing lift. See this NASA link for detail https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/wrong3.html

Halleluja! The Second Coming of Windows Subsystem For Linux blesses Insider faithful

Adrian Harvey

Re: "Windows Subsystem for Linux"

I agree. Horrible name. But at least they are consistent with their previous Windows Subsystem for UNIX Applications naming for the Interix components they bought. AKA Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) before they were bundled with to Windows 2003 R2.

Nope, we're stuffed, shrieks Apple channel as iPhone shipments enter a double-digit spiral

Adrian Harvey

Re: Price sensitive

Well, Apple phones last surprisingly well - a combination of a relatively small number of models making repair parts are available for a long time, and Apple continueing software updates for a long time. This can make their $/year of life less bad than the headline price would make you think.

However that’s not going to make me rush out and buy one of the Excess models to replace my 6S (itself not acquired anywhere near it’s release year). Maybe if I could use my headphones....

Page: