Posts by defiler 997 posts • joined 18 Oct 2010
Swipe & get?
These days with contactless it's "tap & get". I miss the old knuckle-scraper and signing the carbons when using a credit card. I was at a petrol station a couple of weeks ago whose card machine had broken, and had to actually *sign* a slip. It was glorious!
Not sure how far I agree with you, but there is a kernel of truth there - you thought much more about spending money when there was a ceremony to it. Now it's just too easy.
"If there's someone who can get within a couple of meters of one's infrastructure then you've already got a problem."
You could very easily be in a shared data hall in a commercial datacentre. If security is paramount them you'll have a separate room or a cage, but most companies don't need the scale to run their own buildings. That leaves you open to others in the same room getting pretty close to your kit.
However, given the nature of this attack, in a noisy server room you'll be bloody lucky to discern a single signal. For now.
Maybe that's a justification for blade servers - pack the components tighter to blend the EM noise.
SPLA licensing on Microsoft is per-core. For example, if you license Windows it's for a minimum of 8 cores per machine, then increasing 2 at a time. Hence, it may be cheaper to buy, and faster than the Xeon part, but if it costs twice as much each month to run software on it then it's hobbled before you start.
This licensing model has hurt AMD in the past for server CPUs. Great to see some competition though, and anyone licensing per socket is golden.
We had to reapply the thermal paste on about 80% of the CPUs we checked because it was only covering 1/4-1/2 of the CPU. That was after the warranty service guy fixed one by applying so much it was like he'd tried to putty an old window frame. Oh, after we waited 10 days on a 4-hour warranty.
Fuck them. By this point, I'd rather have Packard Bell, AST, Gateway 2000 or one of the other old stalwarts from years ago.
He just said that since Microsoft are still supplying it (just checked on Server 2016) then they should be supporting it. If they didn't want to support it they should have retired it for the anachronism that it is.
Can't remember the last time I used it, but it's still there...
I clearly remember a "compression" tool kicking about, back in the day, that would simply hide the file on your hard disc and leave a pointer to it. Totally bloody useless, and I knew a few folk (definitely older than 10, and computer-literate enough to know better) who believed they'd just packed loads of DooM WADs onto a floppy.
Wasn't part of Windows (it was a 3rd-party practical joke), but it was out there.
Edit: I also remember reports of people "compressing" all their files to floppy and then finding a hidden folder full of "crap" on their C: drive, deleting it, and losing the lot...
"so don't bring up Energia"
Didn't Buran have a payload capacity of ~30T? And Energia put the orbiter up, so surely that would have to have (a) a payload significantly greater than 30T to LEO, and (b) actually have put it up there for Buran to have been whizzing about for hours.
That's my understanding, but I could be wrong. Anyone able to confirm?
I'm so sorry.
I'll be laying hints to replace my Surface Pro 3 with a proper laptop. Probably the biggest use I found for the stylus was to draw dicks onto screenshots to emphasise a point. And the AAAA battery the thing takes was a pig to buy when it ran flat.
"Detachable tablets – think Surface Pros, iPad Pros and other typoslabs – will lead the charge" - Ha! Only by laying the groundwork for another hardware refresh ASAP.
At the moment, the SSD manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves to satisfy the two main drivers in the marketplace - speed and price. Sacrifice one of those for longevity.
As soon as the market demands it (ie is prepared to stump up cold, hard cash for it), the manufacturers will rush headlong into that too.
For now, though, most users seem satisfied that they can get 100x the IOPS out of an SSD than they could on a spinner, and let RAID deal with the drive failures. Hell, it could currently be significantly cheaper to have some bod tour the DC every day swapping out failed SSDs than to try to engineer more longevity into them.
They seem to have been rather pissed off with these streaming boxes for some time, having to field / deflect support requests constantly. At least now they can just shout "trading standards" and get back to what they came for in the first place.
Also, I never liked the name Kodi, and always preferred XBMC. And sometime think that even that was too much and it should have been left as XBMP... So? I'm grisly.
"I still make money from photos I shot 8 years ago on one of my early DSLRs I had at the time. I created the work, I put my hard earned knowledge into it so surely I deserve to still be paid for it?"
Yep. And we're talking about 50 years after a TV show has aired, or 70 years after the death of certain individuals for a movie.
Nobody is trying to change the copyright laws here, and frankly if you can't extract the monetary value of your work within 50 years then you must be working on cold fusion.
Now go forth and sell your works with joy. And remuneration!
"I think situation #1 is the one you need to worry about."
That's a problem that's been solved, solved well, and solved in a pretty foolproof fashion. Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo/Altavista for "multi lock hasp".
Then you put *your own* lock on, and others can lock it too if several people are working in that area. I'd much rather have one of these than a Bluetooth anything protecting my safety.
"...as AI development ramps up, hosting providers must scale to meet demand"
But the demand isn't there 95% of the time. You can't possibly accommodate every last spike in activity and still run a business. Not without it costing more than keeping the system internal to the researchers.
Bottom line, if it's a critical computing resource, make sure *you* can turn the taps on and off.
You see, the problem I have with that is that Facebook make enough money every second to choke a donkey, so why should it be a voluntary effort to moderate for them? It's like Rupert Murdoch asking for home help to cook and clean... I'd rather people with time to donate did something for those with less.
But people keep telling me that Macs don't get these kinds of problems.
And I keep telling them straight back that writing malware solely for a Mac is like making Bride and Bride wedding cakes. It's a pretty limited market, for the effort you need to put in.
I suppose it's a sign of Apple's success that people are bothering with malware for them...
"What on earth do they pay people actually doing difficult dev work?"
Or even the difficult sysadmin job of trying to get the devs to understand that the users do not have and will not get admin permissions. Ever. And that it's reckless for devs to demand 1GbE as a *minimum spec* for a client/server application. I know that Gigabit is relatively trivial these days, but to throw hands up in the air when I say it's only 100Mb in areas?
Anyway, that's my rant about devs and the insinuation that they're the only ones doing a difficult job. Usual caveats that there are also good devs and there are also shit sysadmins, and that when they're together the devs are entitled to hold the cattle prod. I will be the arbitrator of whe is being good and who is shit. All decisions are final. This promotion does not affect your statutory rights. Can I get on with drinking my tea yet?
If there is one body in the country that should be whiter than white with the rules, it's the Government. This strikes me that they're exploiting loopholes in their own legislation to get the staff in place. Which basically implies "do what I say, not what I do".
Hypocritical bastards.
Cooling isn't easy - you have no medium to vent the heat into. You have to radiate it.
This is not my day-job, but my understanding it that it basically has to run like a fridge, pumping the heat into a thermal medium fluid which becomes surprisingly hot. This is used to heat a radiator, which releases the heat into space. There's no convection or conduction of heat outside the spacecraft. Your cooling limit is defined by the area of radiator you can build and the heat you can get it up to.
That's not how much they'd _make_ in the next two years - that's the revenue. There's a big difference between revenue and profit. If their margin is (say) 30% then you're looking at 4-5 years. Even then, that's selling it off pretty cheap in my eyes. Especially when you consider that it's only 1.5-2 Instagrams...
Is it just me who detests seeing "Kodi" and "pirate" glued together every time like this? Kodi is a very capable media player in its own right, which just happens to have some streaming plugins which can be used to violate copyright.
Sort of like assuming Windows, Linux and MacOS are all for pirates because you can get a BitTorrent client...
Really? :-/
Okay, two points for rebuttal here - one, orbital LASER platforms are a bit shit. The effort they take to launch and to refuel is utterly astonishing. And no, solar-powered ones aren't really going to hack it. Have a look at a BBC (Horizon?) documentary called "The Road to Ruin" from about 1983 - it's mentioned in there.
Secondly, radiation is subject to the inverse-square law, so being inside the Chernobyl reactor, within a metre of a broken fuel rod, is significantly more hazardous than being 150 million km from the sun. Of course, Chernobyl is now knocking on for 30 years ago, so reduction due to half-lives etc, but still a serious issue.
I lost one in the North Sea on a lovely day a few years back. Wasn't even mine :(
I was decent enough to replace it at the soonest opportunity, but it somewhat spoiled the fun we were having. They don't half go when you get the hang of throwing them (but obviously not good enough to control them!)
@ Matt Bryant
Yes, its own dedicated server made problems nicely contained and isolated. However, with the people I worked for at the time, if the BES was off then it was wailing and gnashing of teeth. Seriously, everything else could have been gold-plated and diamond-encrusted. Every sandwich could have been server with an extra eclair. Every coffee with a free blowjob. But if the BES were off, the world was ending and it was my personal problem to deal with it.
Frankly, the rest of the network could have been on fire, but so long as the BES was up, these narcissistic dicks didn't mind.
(Our BESs were pretty rock-solid, but fuck them anyway for the bad memories.)
I suspect there's a lot of (justifiable) health & safety going on here.
It's one thing to start shoving humans onto the top of an occasionally-exploding missile when you're a government, they're military, and you've got a cold war going on; and another completely when you're a company, they're civilians, and it's a product development flight.
Well, not really, but legally. I'm sure the poor sod in the can feels much the same either way.
> I still think that the "all came of nothing" claim is just a convenience and a way of avoiding to admit that we have no clue.
Meanwhile, I consider it a tantalising, but otherwise irrelevant, distraction. A barrier beyond which we cannot possibly see. We don't have a clue, and we can never have a clue. So what's the point in worrying about it?
What was "here" "beforehand"? Could be anything. Another universe, noise and light, or just turtle-porn all the way down...
We're on a hard disc that got reformatted >13Bn years ago. Good luck finding your old files from before the reinstall... (Maybe we should be scouring the universe for bad sectors that have been mapped out beforehand.)
My excuse is Veeam. Doesn't cover KVM yet, but people keep asking. They've not committed, but on their forums Veeam have suggested that with the meteoric rise in popularity of KVM they'll likely be looking at it in 2018.
Used KVM plenty of times in small environments, but for work I wouldn't want to go without my backup crutch!
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