Posts by cream wobbly

Re: Would have been nice to target the right manufacturers El Reg

perhaps Tesla should have checked what they were buying more carefully.

praps, aye. "disruptive" and all that, see above

Re: Any Reg readers living in Amsterdam right now?

Never have so many known so little about their own country.

I wouldn't say that. It's certainly true that the English are pretty ignorant, and always have been; but Yanks are giving them a run for their ... lack of self awareness. Other nationalities susceptible to similar behaviour include the Iberians, Russians, probably Italians, and very much the Danish. I'll wait for you to make the connection between those nations attitudes to foreigners and their recent history of politics. (Here's a hint: the Germans have climbed down in the last century, so don't feature on the list.)

Re: Not the root problem

Security by obscurity. How well does that work? In war, which is what the Wild, Wild West of the Internet most resembles these days, you must always incorporate "The Enemy" being able to see everything you have and do if you want to win, if not to survive. The same logic applies to every other bit of code and data you are relying on. This is as true about competitors as about hackers/crackers, too.

Sure, just make it easy for them.

Another principle of "war" is knowing who your enemies are. You don't just leave everything open to everyone without having them clear some obstacle.

Re: resentment of Clippy

Clearly that's Soviet Russia Clippy. Клипливо?

Re: Why still a phone line on it??

If fax is "dinosaur" technology, what the math are ballpoint pens? or pencils? Or heck, (electronic versions of) the slates my grandma used to write on at school?

Re: Power hungry, low coverage, and heavier.

Now if only they'd make 3G phones last almost a full working day before they run out of battery. That'd be nice.

Re: What we need

The C64 also benefited from the SID audio synth-on-a-chip. Unlike "chip music" from other 8-bit micros which typically waggled a DAC around to make PWM noise, the C64 was actually playing music on a viable musical instrument via simple digital registers. The most notable technical thing about it is that once you started playing a note, you didn't have to tie up the CPU to keep on playing it; ... like you did on the Speccy. Another reason why Spectrum games tended not to have in-game music but C64 games did.

Another aside: the SID was used in a couple of real synths; although their makers were always desperate for supply.

The "my CPU is better than your CPU" debate is really irrelevant when your CPU is doing everything and mine is just asking other parts of the architecture to do stuff. The same applies to Firewire vs USB.

Re: good lord; is this not a techie site?

"The last time one person could know all science and technology was centuries ago."

Oh go on with you. The article is about something called WireGuard. If you don't know what it is, don't comment about it, or Google it and then comment. The person you're responding to is specifically calling out others on their inability to comprehend bloat, external modules, and precompiled modules; particular the difference between using dkms and not.

Re: type 'reboot' in the local console instead of the remote one

I quite often advise other sysadmins to reboot the box instead of clicking about trying to "find root cause", much to their horror. In my eyes, a 30 day uptime is a prime contributor to root cause, and because of failure to patch, an increasing security risk. (Or if it's Windows, 7 days.)

You can do your analysis after you've rebooted. But I know they won't.

If you think that's too harsh, have a word with yourself.

Re: @AC ... The cat is pretty well out of the bag already

In the US, there's a concept called the 'Castle Doctrine'

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Uh, since there are no actual real castles in the US, where do you suppose they got the idea?

I'll wait for you to catch up. You get an extra day off next week to think about it, and there's even a helpful clue in the name of the holiday!

Re: Rubbish in, rubbish out...

"My own impression of Dutch is that it is one third English, one third German, and one third that I cannot make out."

All three are common descendants of Proto-Germanic. English is built on the same structure as Dutch, but has a ton of Scandinavian influence in spelling, and a lorry load of Romance vocabulary and idioms added. Dutch has Gothic and Spanish to thank for its whack pronunciation. German grammar was reformed multiple times so it would be taken seriously like Latin.

Re: The biggest problem

If someone else connects it, then you don't have to worry about it being yours.

Re: Data format parsing

Yeah, this is a bugbear of mine, too: credit card numbers, dates, and phone numbers without any delimiters. Just let me enter them, and run my input through your implementation's version of "tr -dc [:digit:]".

CNDVFS it is then!

Beware of the Leopard?

Not really feeling it, are you?

In computing jargon, erasure is as simple as unlinking. The data's still there, but there's no direct path to its retrieval. It's the electronic version of 'in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.”'

In legal jargon, erasure has a very definite meaning, closer to the common sense concept of erasure: the data's gone. This type of erasure in computing jargon means scrubbing; whether that's overwriting with zeroes, or "dd </dev/urandom >/that/guy" in a loop fifteen times with an upside-down chicken on your left elbow.

Of course if you scrub something, you should log it...

Re: "reflects perhaps misplaced confidence"

Nah, I wanted the new Notepad that handles Unix line ends. It took a while to install Notepad, but it was worth every penny.

Re: Fiat 500

"You can guarantee that the owners have not the slightest clue about oils so just pick up 20w50 and go with it (which to paraphrase Robin Williams is "great when you're in a landcrab, but not so great when you've got VVTi") or (and my neighbour actually killed one doing this) top it up to the valve gear."

So, you don't like the Fiat 500 because someone once didn't know how to do an oil change?

Maybe there ought to be warnings. Just saying....

Worth adding for clarity that the generic name search was the method used to arrive at the list of URLs. But the legal complaint revolves around the URLs on the list; not the search term. The merits or lack thereof for the presence of each URL is what was being debated; and that's where the simplistic methodology came up.

Re: Not useful

"We have only a sample of one (here) which is statistically meaningless."

Not really. We know roughly when proto-life emerged from spiral molecules, and for roughly how long the conditions conducive to forming those (or similar) molecular spirals were in existence prior to that. We know roughly the astronomical conditions necessary to producing the planetary surface conditions. From there we can deduce some very broad probabilities.

Thing about broad probabilities is when you combine them, they either splounce out to infinities, or they limit themselves. It happens that these are the sort that self-limit.

I mean, it's not like we have anything close to useful that could guide us where to look. Pretty much the best we've got is "I hope that star isn't exploding or collapsing", (but even that makes an unreasonably big assumption that stellar stability is key to life). We don't really know how old their planets are ... yet. We don't know anything at all about their surface conditions. But that's just the probability for evolving life. Life, it can be concluded, given certain pretty common conditions, is pretty much inevitable.

When you start talking about intelligent life though [1], the probabilities start to diverge again. Add in technological intelligent life, and the divergence increases. Add in communicative technological intelligent life, and it's almost as useless trying to make predictions about that as it is to prove the existence of a soul [2].

So it's quite possible that we could eventually make great predictions about where to look for signs of intelligent life [1] but technological and communicative? You're just going to have to keep that screensaver running and brute-force it.

1. Yes I know, not the Whitehouse. Ell Oh Ell.

2. Pronounced "arsehole", natch.

Re: Hmmm...

If it helps, Minix, Mach, Hurd, Exec, and Fuchsia (okay, Zircon) won't suffer the 'slowness feature'. Less-than A aitch-ref equals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate greater-than I'll wait for you to catch up less-than oblique a greater than.

Re: Expect better than this from the reg

"the commentards at El Reg tend to have well-developed critical and analytical skills and take great delight in pulling this sort of research apart"

Nope, most of them up to this point have been "Oh I need a wee dram and to sexually harrass some women". The well-developed critical analytic skills you're talking about are few and far between and exemplified by the post you're railing against. Well done!

Re: bazillion other laws or observations we still consider correct

By which you mean, these ain't fudges; they were just written as unknowns which became known later.

Dark matter and dark energy are unknowns. Axions might turn out to be the phlogistons of our age, but right now, we don't know. That's kinda what "unknown" means.

Re: The Quantum of Firefox

That's a bit of a leap.

Re: The Man Who Fell To Earth: a_yank_lurker

"Yet don't require insurance, an annual worthiness test, a proficiency test, to be visible at night and an understanding that red means STOP and green means GO."

Insurance, roadworthiness and proficiency tests aside, bikes are required to be visible at night in the UK and the US, and cyclists are are required to follow the rules of the road; which include not breaking the push-bike speed limit of 25 mph. (You get a lot of pop-pop bikes being impounded in the US for doing 30.)

Other road users also subject to all the same conditions as cyclists include walkers, runners, skateboarders, rollerbladers, wheelchair users. Are you butthurt about them, too?

"and they are called railways"

Almost every logical development of self-driving cars lands on some form of railway.

Every self-driving car making the same observations will choose the same lane of traffic.

Every self-driving car driving in the same lane of traffic will drive along the same two patches of tarmac or concrete. Why not make them metal?

Since everyone seems to be going the same way, scale up from 5 .. 7 passengers per ride to 50 .. 70 passengers per ride.

Sell tickets!

Have platforms!

Sell sandwiches of dubious freshness!

Re: Really??

"but autonomous driving will always be responsible for deaths"

Ahem. That case had nothing to do with autonomous driving. Rephrased, then: the driver who engaged cruise control and then took his eyes off the road to enjoy a movie was responsible for his own death.

Re: IoT vendors bad for health care?

"Not connected to the Internet" but connected to a VPN means two things:

1. there's only one more layer of security to get through to attack such devices

2. there's likely zero security on the device itself because the VPN is seen as sufficient

and for a bonus

3. you can scratch the first two letters of IoT

I would tend to believe a former healthcare professional which she speaks in the context of cybersecurity that these devices don't need to be connected.

Re: Direct link to Deity

"it was probably the one thing that stopped the person taking their own life"

You know, whenever I look for something, I always find it in the last place I looked.

Religion just happened to be the last thing you turned to before you extracted yourself from your suicidal phase, so it feels like it was the only thing that helped, despite it being just the first thing that helped. I hope you find the will to pursue a sounder path out of depression, because mere religion is almost guaranteed to let you down.

Back to the topic: the religious seem to think that secularity is theirs for "potential conversion". It seldom is. It's very seldom welcomed. And if someone wants religion, as you did, they'll go find it. A Christian Linux is a terrible idea. Let's say you'd been told by Clippy that "It looks like you're writing a suicide note... you should go talk to a priest" -- I've a sneaking suspicion we wouldn't be having this conversation today.