Sure about ARM ?
Any chance we’re talking POWER or MIPS ?
298 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Apr 2016
Just noticed the VM Voom business product. It's only slightly more than the £27 I am on for the rest of the year and _less_ than the forty something they put me up to without asking. Something to consider should I want to host something at home (keeping in mind the officially dynamic IP address).
Would love a constant 4Mbps upstream to Virgin Media but it's just so asymmetric with them. Next time they think about moving me from around £30 to over £40 per month calling it "package upgrade for free" I'll take another very serious look at Andrews & Arnold. I also want IPv6. Even BT have that out of the starting gates.
I was impressed at how good mobile data was a few weeks ago on a liveaboard boat in the Maldives.
We had some old build scripts from before virtualisation and containers became all the rage and fakeroot got adopted that had to run as the super-user (don't ask) and did this
rm -rf ${BUILD_DEST}/
but didn't check the variable first.
Now one advantage of proper hard disks is that you have a few seconds to realise what's going on.
For protection against ransomware and finger trouble as opposed to hardware failure snapshots as on ZFS are absolutely brilliant and relatively straightforward to set up.
You can have @hour1..@hourn, @day1..@dayn and so on and they are all automatically mounted (at least under FreeBSD) and accessible without privilege.
(Note FreeBSD automagically mounts ZFS snapshots, Linux might not.)
At the museum I really enjoy watching people of _all_ ages pick up BBC User Guide or our booklet and start playing. The biggest issue is that BBC Basic is uppercase. "Mistake" doesn't quite convey this.
Ah Ciba-Geigy. I did a contract at a related company Techne in Duxford not that along ago working on Motorola 68HC code continuing my largely 8 bit career that started with the Z80. We used their canteen and would wander onto their site at lunchtime.
A symmetrical 10Mbps copper connection to the street box to doors away would be more useful to me than what I have now (a VM 30 or 50 Meg service).
Agreed the technology is irrelevant. Unfortunately to specify these things correctly is a waaay more complicated than just saying it's copper or fibre.
Much the same age as flingback. I still have my 15W Antex iron that was £5 from Odeon Radio ! It's not been my main iron for ages but I still use it occasionally.
Main local electronics shop was on Village Way East, Rayners Lane. Occasionally for a real outing I would visit Maplin in Hammersmith.
I loved the catalogues with the cover art and stacks of data.
Next time somebody complains about UNIX family operating systems not having the current directory in the path this is something else to point them to.
Acknowledging the differences between DLLs on Windows and executables on UNIX the issues still seems ever so similar to me. Though you really really shouldn’t be doing system stuff in a directory writeable by others.
This is the problem. KDE, GNOME and friends change too often. Even with their annoyances the MS Windows and MacOS shells are useable and I won’t spend ages working out how to do something like say create a desktop shortcut. So I’d much rather keep UNIX family OSs (not just Linux) for servers where they rule and have something useable to live with.
Should be obvious. If you want security remove or disable USB and that was the case before recent Intel AMT discoveries. If you want USB for keyboard and mouse GLUE THEM IN PLACE.
Though it's true 2% can make a difference for the NHS for most cloud services it's more like when you press a button the website it takes 0.938s to respond instead of 0.925s to respond.
If you spend much of your day browsing and experiencing a few milliseconds here and there due to this extra overhead and the rest discussing it on this forum chances are the difference really won't affect you.
The problem is really for providers that share their hardware between customers AND there's lots of I/O or system call or context switch stuff going on.
For some applications like fraud pattern chasing and banking stuff is overnight and non-interactive.
For home non-gaming users it's likely the CPUs are either completely idle anyway or running malware.
"turn the bleeding Mobile MODEM off"...."pinging the next tower"
Yes I do sometimes turn mobile data off if I want to watch a video or something but would normally do such things on the tablet.
Actually the modulator-demodulator** is part of the kit that attaches you to the mobile network and no you don't turn that off except in aeroplane mode. So if you want to be able to say make and receive calls the tower stuff continues.
** We're a long way from when a modem was simply a frequency/phase/amplitude shift thing but still have the word
I feel a little pragmatism is called for.
Sometimes it just isn't realistically possible to get rid of the likes of WinXP or earlier but as long as something goes between it'll be ok. For example if the current system has WinXP with shares then rig up a proxy possibly involving Samba that can intercept things.
And no DON'T build the proxy on a system loaded with every tool an attacker could possibly want. Use a minimal container.
I could be wrong and perhaps I'm getting old but the problems here seem to be
* A staggering number of x86 devices. Not just a few each for mobile, desktop and enterprise. If there were fewer they could spend more time on quality
* A rush to patch things without testing properly. In Intel's case the number of microcode variants required not helped by the above. In others' cases sometimes stupidity
* No clear documentation for patches for the end user. I'd like to clear on JUST ONE LINK to be told what exactly is an an update/patch
We have had to prepare a statement for customers too stating that
* We run only our code. If we allowed otherwise it would be bad for you. Really bad and I mean you TheRegister reader's various communication and financial service providers
* These CPUs are old/slow enough not to speculatively do anything.
Drive encryption should not require more system calls than before being just further processing. But there Is the theoretical possibility of user land i.e. browser discovering your keys then somebody physically thieving the machine.
ARM may have issues but being a forty year old 8 bit micro with stuff lashed on isn’t one of them. Well it has evolved but started as a 32 bit (26 bit address limited earlier) machine.
The hypervisor is in a fuzzy way kernel so in an unqualified way I think it can leak just the same but I may be wrong.
I got this Lenovo E73 i5 Haswell machine from BT Business Direct a couple of years ago and must say am still pleased with it though did upgrade it with SSD and RAM. The amount of junkware was minimal. I have experienced HPs and cheap Dells before.
The only thing that absolutely does not work is resume from Sleep despite attempts at updating the appropriate drivers. Hibernate is fine though and what I do daily.
Oh Grub. The bootloader that under Ubuntu at least comes split across several packages to increase the chances of it screwing up.
Do you think it asked me before it decided to change the display mode to something the monitor attached to the server could not handle ? This may have been partly Ubuntu's fault. Again 12 or 14 LTS.
Am I getting to old for this or has nobody got the slightest idea what stability is these days ?
Don't kid yourself that LTS is stable either. I have experienced several incidences of Ubuntu LTS breaking the kernel/initrd for the next boot or failing to load suitable SATA drivers into the init rd and breaking the next boot.
It also fails to keep a copy of the last known good kernel and init rd as any change in initramfs tools or a kernel module or boot loader gubbins makes it rebuild the lot.
"quite why a PSU manufacturer does not do single stage to 12V then a bunch of DC-DC step downs in an ordinary ATX PSU form factor beats me."
Err that's exactly what they do though historically 5V and maybe 3.3V and a couple of negative rails too.
Same with our stuff. There's 3.3V, 2.5V 1.8V 1.2V, 0.8V. More voltages than you can shake a stick at. They're generated close to where they are needed. These could NOT be done in the main PSU (and work properly) for various reasons.
-48V is to do with corrosion and being a round but small number of common lead acid batteries and not quite painful to handle unless you are very wet.
We produce a lot of our kit with -48V power supplies for data centres.
I was amused to see the LED on stick units at every seat at the London 2012 main stadium were marked as -48V.
Transistors for tens of volts are relatively common and cheap. Go up to hundreds of volts and it isn't so.
The problem in the modern data centre context is the massive current required compared to running at mains voltages.
Almost all modern switchers will work perfectly well at 80-400 a.c. or d.c. Something to think about when the grid fails and you have solar P.V. Needs a bit of jiggery pokery if the open circuit voltage is near 600v as it is with mine.
If servers weren't built from commodity hardware there would be more than a few percent of power savings to be made.
For example feed in a few hundred volts d.c. and you can
* throw away the rectfier (which you'd still need somewhere of course for mains input but can be done better)
* have smaller input capacitors
* throw away the power factor correction section
* feed straight from a simplified inverter from solar P.V. or wind generator it being easier to output d.c. than synchronised 50Hz. The inverter now doesn't need those big capacitors either.
I once had great respect for Maplin and their catalogues what with the data within and spaceship on the front. But now they sell mostly expensive tat.
We do electronics and soldering classes mainly for school kids at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, they're very popular and something we will do more of. I enjoy helping out except maybe when I held a PCB and component in place for a little girl to solder but she took forever and I was sure my fingers smelt slightly bacon afterwards.
With all its faults I do respect that just not having it isn't an option. I went to a talk about trying to replace it yielding essentially broken machines. The surprising thing was that people considered the result useful.
It's the thing that stops the chip cooking itself after all.
But maybe there is middle ground where the customer (machine maker) could have their variant supplied with all the remote management and USB<->JTAG crap removed but keeping power and thermal management.