* Posts by Stoneshop

5951 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009

Thomas the Tank Engine lobotomised by fat (remote) controller

Stoneshop

Re: High self opinion?

I looked up properties for sale in Paraburdoo. Average asking price for 14 homes was $358,000. Doesn't sound so undesirable to me.

The price of an item is a reflection of demand versus supply. Try figuring the demand for luxury mansions on Tristan Da Cunha.

In the case of Paraburdoo demand will be limited (by number of miners not owning houses already, roughly), but supply is also limited (noone's going to cart in house parts unless there's actual demand) so that will keep prices at the level you see.

HPE coughed up source code for Pentagon's IT defenses to ... Russia

Stoneshop
Go

Re: Did I understand this right?

Yes! RFC3514 as the solution for all security problems.

Has it been updated to cover IPv6?

The UK isn't ditching Boeing defence kit any time soon

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Re: Beautiful aircraft, but not quite up to spec for modern heavy lift.

Wait, European or African An2's?

Yes.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: tosspot clowns of the British government look round,..got nowhere else to go..

The f**king delusional bu***hit heroic vision of the 1957 Defense Review under the Conservative Defense Minister Duncan Sandys

A name I recognise from R.V.Jones' "Most Secret War", in which he is portrayed not very positively.

Stoneshop
Devil

Re: nowhere else to go and buy defence aircraft rather than Boeing

we could put a whole plane together with enough government subsidy

80% of the budget will be spent on committee meetings determining what colour it should be, and the remaining 80% on committee meetings to determine the composition of the aforementioned committees.

Stoneshop

Beautiful aircraft, but not quite up to spec for modern heavy lift.

Well, if two swallows can carry a coconut together, why wouldn't a bunch of An2's provide the required heavy lifting capability combined?

Stoneshop

as RyanAir never seem to land quite where you might expect them to.

Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.

Dildon'ts of Bluetooth: Pen test boffins sniff out Berlin's smart butt plugs

Stoneshop
FAIL

UI (for Usual Interface)

"The challenge is the lack of a UI to enter a classic Bluetooth pairing PIN. Where do you put a UI on a butt plug, after all?"

What happened to "Press this button to start pairing mode", which times out after a couple of minutes?

Vibrating walls shafted servers at a time the SUN couldn't shine

Stoneshop

Re: VMS documentation

Your little MicroVAX would be delivered on one pallet, the VMS documentation kit would turn up in another.

An educational institution which shall not be named had, back in the days, several tens of mVAX workstations, as well as a fair few big'uns. At some point they ordered OS upgrade kits for the lot. Licensing required you to order one upgrade per system.

The order number they used was for the kit with full VMS documentation.

Stoneshop

Re: Dockyard

At another client, we had a lightning strik and they lost a couple of hundred VT100s.

Large warehouse facility. Probably close to a hundred VT100's. Serial cabling running to a Gandalf port switch near the systems. Lightning strike, right on the roof.

That was the end of the Gandalf and of about half the VT100's, most of which had spiderwebs of circuit traces holding pieces of charred circuit board inside.

Stoneshop

EU power supplies

Though, on a second thought, Ultrasparc 2 - that is from the days before the the universal 100-240V power supplies when US vendors fitted a "Eu PS" which should have been called "Eu PoS" in their gear to sell over here.

The VAX9000, power-hungry beast that it was, had a rather, ahem, unique power system layout. The power supplies inside the system cabinets themselves ran off a 280VDC bus, supplied from the Power Front End, a double-wide 19" cabinet, containing a transformer, rectifiers, control thingamajigs and several banks of electrolytic caps. Those were to provide a few seconds (!) of buffering in case of power glitches, such as when switching from utility power to a local generator.

For Europe they just added another transformer, in a cabinet the size of a VAX 11/750, turning 220V three-phase into 110V (the documentation states the power front end came in 110V and 220V models, but I've only seen the 110V model with that auxiliary transformer added).

Stoneshop

At DEC's headquarters in Maynard

disk drives in one of the computer rooms would experience brief bursts of read errors during the day. Simultaneously. But not all of them, some appeared to be utterly unaffected. The read errors were diagnosed to be track misalignment errors, and when one of the field engineers noticed the building going *bump* being what triggered a slew of errors the problem was fairly quickly pinpointed to be trucks backing up into the loading docks below. The affected drives had linear head positioners aligned with the direction of the impact; those that had them at right angles didn't care.

Ex-sperm-inate! Sam the sex-droid 'heavily soiled' in randy nerd rampage

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: Gimmi!

they dump kids on you out of no where

You, sir, appear to be in dire need of a few biology lessons.

Deloitte is a sitting duck: Key systems with RDP open, VPN and proxy 'login details leaked'

Stoneshop

And they probably get the services at cost

a) they don't

b) all the warm bods (at whatever level of competence) are contracted out to customers, so there aren't any to keep the inhouse shit compliant.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

Stoneshop

Re: PGP crypto keys..

either way.....I'm wondering what laptop to take next time I travel.

None.

If you go there on business, you get the receiving party to provide you with one. If it's a private visit just ask your friends/family over there to scrounge a not-too-shabby one off Craigslist/Cash Converters/charity shop/thrift store for the time you need it, after which they can sell it off (if they don't have a spare one around you can use).

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Re: I believe the word we are all struggling to vocalise is ...

Some of us don't have much choice in the matter, what with living here and all.

I don't think the applicable word is 'visit' if you're already living there.

Stoneshop
Facepalm

He should have surrendered his on the way out.

He clearly surrendered his brain somewhere.

Don't panic, but.. ALIEN galaxies are slamming Earth with ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: I got a sudden warm feeling

That's no consolation if you happen to be standing there at the time. I think 10EeV is about 2J?

1.602J, to be exact, or 84.92 hamsterseconds.

Bill Gates says he'd do CTRL-ALT-DEL with one key if given the chance to go back through time

Stoneshop

Re: Requiring two or three keys in combination

My home server, in a homebuilt rackmount case because of space constraints, has two toggle switches that need to be actuated (upwards) simultaneously to perform a reset. And they're far enough apart that you can't easily do that with one hand.

RIP Stanislav Petrov: Russian colonel who saved world from all-out nuclear war

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Hang YOUR head in shame, or have it examined.

(El Reg, please get a web designer who doesn't consider an editing window of about 1/20th of the actual screen surface a good reason to get his head examined or just quit the "industry" in shame)

How about grabbing the lower right corner of the editing window and pulling it down as far as you'd like?

Farewell Cassini! NASA's Saturnian spacecraft waves goodbye for its Grand Finale

Stoneshop

Re: CONNECT TITAN

That'd be GANYMD, as VMS hostnames can be 6 characters long at most. Or GANYMEDE was the LAT service name, not the hostname.

#include "cobwebs.ico"

Stoneshop
Thumb Up

Clearly not bad news

although the final bits of Cassini's signal will not reach Earth until nearly an hour and a half later, due to the travel time for its radio signal.

Underlining the statement "the science isn't going to stop" at the end of the article is the mention of the speed of the data. Had it been bad news we would have known immediately.

'All-screen display'? But surely every display is all-screen... or is a screen not a display?

Stoneshop
Headmaster

or is a screen not a display?

There's a screen, about 14 by 6.5 linguine, roughly 8 linguine from the end of my bed, but what it's displaying is just the hallway on the other side. And the occasional flying irritant trying to get past it.

So, no.

Stoneshop
Headmaster

Let's leave such hyperbole to when the world comes apart, shall we?

It's getting there, so Apple is just preparing us for that.

Python explosion blamed on pandas

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: Why not Fortran?

Real Programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.

And Real Real Programmers can write assembler in FORTRAN.

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: Python explosion blamed on pandas

Well, there are pics on Da Intarwebz of a python explosion caused by a crocodile, but none by pandas. So I am disinclined to accept the statement posited above as true.

Hubble catches a glimpse WASP-12b, an almost pitch-black exoplanet

Stoneshop

making the planet darker than fresh asphalt!

It's just an interstellar parking lot. Without the yellow lines, because the local council couldn't agree on the optimum grid size for the various species' craft, and said "bugger it, their nav system should be able to find a free spot anyway".

Auto-makers told their autopilots need better safeguards

Stoneshop

Re: It is easier to automate the damn highway

Massive infrastructure project, yes, but really it would put car companies out of business because nobody's car would be any different to the one next to it.

Er, no. People still have different transport needs: different maximum number of occupants, different load capacity, different maximum range, and people also have different spending room towards their vehicle(s). Plus, your automated highway won't control you all the way from door to door. Maybe that that last mile can be autonomously navigated by the car, but that depends on the circumstances.

As long as cars have a standardised way of 'hooking in/out' of the 'train', it doesn't matter whether you're driving a 2CV, a Lamborghini or a Ford Transit.

Stoneshop

Re: Tesla Autopilot drove straight into the side of a truck...

It didn't even see the truck.

That seems to be correct, yes.

It apparently didn't even notice the crash!!

As evidenced by its lack of reaction and subsequent tree impact.

If you had read the NTSB report, which contains the car controller logs, it is quite clear that the car DID sense the actual crash. From 13:36:12.7 (US Pacific time, so 17:36:12.7 local time) through 13:36:25.8 the car's data logging reports "Vehicle alert consistent with collision damage", and a number of sensor fault/sensor missing messages, including "Brake controller CAN node is MIA". So even if a brake command was issued, there would have been no response.

The new, new Psion is getting near production. Here's what it looks like

Stoneshop

No contest

Is there a real market for this type of devices? Note if this is executed really well, it goes against Chromebooks.

That would require Chromebooks to be capable of being folded over twice while not gaining any thickness.

Something the size of a Chromebook had better be a full-blown laptop running Linux or *BSD, not some front-end for an ad-slinging, data-slurping cloud. And this is still a fully autonomous system, but now scaled down to fit in a jacket pocket.

Stoneshop

Re: Love projects like these...

If somebody came out with something maybe just a little bit fatter with room for a swappable HD / SSD

You don't want a conventional HD or HD-sized SDD in there, even if that would offer you swappability: too big and heavy compared to the entire machine. But an M.2 might suit your needs, and running off a fast SD card is utterly feasible too.

Stoneshop
Go

Re: Connects how?

"ARCNet."

RS-232

Econet.

Stoneshop

Storage

One of the most irritating issues with Psion was that they locked up their approach to storage in patents, which is why in the days of the Organiser II nobody else could make memory packs using EPROMs.

The 5 and 5MX took standard CF cards, and while I can't recall if the native EPOC format was something other than FAT, it could read my camera's cards.

Stoneshop

Battery power

Reminds me of the Olivetti Quaderno from circa 1993, which was a fine form factor but embuggered with NECs take on the 8086 processor in an era when the 386 was well established.

Compared to Intel's 8086 the V30 (V30HL for the Quaderno) was definitely nippier, and while there was a version of the Quaderno with a 386, it couldn't run half as long on batteries. So it depends on whether you prefer processing power or runtime.

And if you really want runtime, get a 5(MX).

Stoneshop

Re: Sony Vaio P

I rather miss the Toshiba Libretto

In 2009 my girlfriend went to New Zealand for a convention and a bit of travelling around by motorcycle, and took a 110 running W98SE, upgraded with an 8GB SSD, a wireless card and an USB2 card. This was close to perfect: sufficient for email, storing pictures, and resizing and uploading a few of them.

perhaps in 1996 the hardware wasn't mature enough for the form factor (486 processor, 1260x600 display, Windows 98, 8M Ram, 270M HD)

I think you're off a bit: from memory the screen was 800x480, and the 110 had a Pentium 233 and 64MB RAM; other models were less powerful.

Stoneshop

Re: Connects how?

A bit bemused by an article on a portable device that fails to mention connectivity - Wireless? 4G? Bluetooth? Token Ring?

It's been mentioned in previous articles, as well as here

Stoneshop

Re: Want!

A Linux machine I can do useful work with and stick in my handbag?

Given the Tardis-like properties of most handbags you can have half a data centre in there, and the Gemini would make a nice terminal for it.

The power cord would be a bit of a bugger, though.

Stoneshop

Re: Sony Vaio P

While labeled as ultraportable, the Vaio P is still seriously larger than the 5MX: 24.5x12cm versus 17x9cm. The 5MX I can put in my jacket pocket, the P doesn't fit.

Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable to overlay attack

Stoneshop
Holmes

Re: Everybody without Android Oreo vulnerable...

So that would mean my N900, C5-00 and XP5300 would be affected? Not to mention the C605, SH888 and 5MX? None of them seem even capable of running any Android version, let alone Oreo.

And I like it that way.

Boffins: 68 exoplanets in prime locations to SPY on humanity on Earth

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: @Lee D Fait accompli, mate

Many of the exoplanets we've found are less than 100 light years away, none are billions of light years away.

But they can well be several billion years old, like our own solar system. Life, and from that communities and civilisation don't spring into being in a week.

Stoneshop
Windows

Re: Fait accompli, mate

a planet full of neanderthals, [...] had little idea of community,

Right. Try the next not-developed-to-current-standards species (and you'll probably be wrong again).

Red panic: Best Buy yanks Kaspersky antivirus from shelves

Stoneshop
Holmes

My most dangerous compute exposure is when I need to run Windows for work, and must visit a range of work-required sites.

This is done on a laptop provided by work, and via a VPN terminating at work.

If something nefarious happens: not my circus, not my monkeys.

User demanded PC be moved to move to a sunny desk – because it needed Windows

Stoneshop
Facepalm

Re: As any good medical professional will tell you

As an EE, the old joke was to send an intern down to the stockroom to get a Write Only Memory.

Well, they tend to be labeled as Exabyte 8mm drives, so, no problem, just that you have to know the cross-reference.

As Hurricane Irma grows, Earth now lashed by SOLAR storms

Stoneshop
Mushroom

the equivalent explosive power of 24,000,000,000 kilotons of TNT.

... making the Tsar Bomba look like a wet firecracker.

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

Stoneshop

Re: Replacement?

I'm afraid new planets moons will be named after something like social celebrities,

Those occasionally smash into each other (usually only verbally, though), and try to annihilate their adversary, so that would be fitting, in a way.

15 'could it be aliens?' fast radio bursts observed in one night

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: I am Appalled and Outraged!

One unit that is also missing from the Reg Standards Converter is time*. Sticking with a conventional unit until a Reg one comes along, energy could be expressed as hamsterfortnights, with this galaxy emitting 43.816138 trillion trillion hamsterfortnights per burst.

* lunchtime is way too variable, although that can actually be useful on occasion.

Stoneshop
Boffin

Re: I am Appalled and Outraged!

Addition to definitions.units:

hamster 1|53 watt

wales 20776980000 m^2

footballpitch 4050.7601 m^2

belgium 30528.33 km^2

congo 2354031.834 km^2

norris 100 N

linguine 140 mm

doubledecker 9.219 m

brontosaurus 138.2851 m

walnut 83776 mm^3

egg_vol 183260 mm^3

grapefruit 523600 mm^3

airbag 575960 mm^3

funbag 1712172 mm^3

football 5796252 mm^3

pool 2502.8677 m^3

jub 4200 g

eiffeltower 7000000 kg

pepcon 2700 ton_tnt

mythbusters_cement_mixer 0.34 ton_tnt

tad 1.25 ml

dash 0.625 ml

pinch 0.3125 ml

smidgen 0.15625 ml

drop 0.078125 ml

Thousands of hornets swarm over innocent fire service drone

Stoneshop

Re: Where's the AI angle? @Stoneshop

At home we have a smallish industrial unit with two of those blue/UV tubes (rural area with insects of various species being common occurrence, so it's worth its weight in gold), and recently the (electronic) ballast went to meet its maker*. Taking a peek inside the zapping business was a 1kV transformer rated at a couple of mA, with interlock switches so that getting the cremation tray out would not be fraught with tension.

Regular mozzies and fruit flies just go *brzt*, but several other flying irritants sometimes manage to frizzle for several seconds, some even ten or more, and stink up the place to boot.

* Italian, so utterly unsurprising.

Stoneshop
Mushroom

Re: Where's the AI angle?

Also I have hit an Asian Hornet with one of those electric bug tennis rackets, it just looked annoyed

You want the MegaZap, although getting to wave one around like a tennis racket would be a bit of a problem, I guess. Maybe fit one to a cherry-picker?

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

Stoneshop

Re: If you're going to make an anniversary thinkpad

In my Impressive Pile of ThinkPads* there is one Butterfly with a b0rked mainboard. I've been toying with the idea of turning it into a Butterfleee, although a ButterPi looks to be the direction I'll be taking now.

Including a TransNote, but the Pile could still gain some Impressiveness.