Posts by jms222

Sure about ARM ?

Any chance we’re talking POWER or MIPS ?

Why ?

Enterprise and Raspberry Pi in the same sentence ? WTF !

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).

As for loaded cruftware what do you think makes your cheapo machine that cheap ? Really ?

You don't get nearly as much if you buy something just a little bit decent.

May be worth a look.

Didn't somebody die at Heathrow recently from a vehicle collision causing hours of (probably unnecessary) delays ?

When I landed at Grotwick last month we had to wait what seemed like ages while they cleared vehicles that shouldn't have parked on the stand.

Remember it's a SoC for set-top boxes

and do not even bother saying "if only it had something other" until you read the subject above again and consider the costs or whatever it was.

Found this explanation

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/846gpm/how_cts_labs_created_their_offices_out_of_thin_air/

speaks for itself.

Not all

They have a few things selling cheaply. I have just bought a branded component for repairing something, for a third of the price Farnell and others sell it for.

When I say bought I mean shown in stock paid for local collection.

No problem here

No problem here. My customer, with everything absolutely up-to-date as of a few days ago, and they ran Samba 3 until then, uses the same SMB password for all accounts so this flaw would not cause any more of a security problem.

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.

Snapshots

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.)

Solutions

a) never clean them

b) draw giant cocks on them

BBC Basic

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.

Although it's Google

Could fly for the following reasons

* Can't be worse than current Android Studio

* Who wants to learn Objective C for Apple stuff ?

* People with Scandinavian names involved

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.

Current directory in path

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.

On Free School Lane in Cambridge the electron was discovered so you'd think you'd be able to pass mobile data at a tiny fraction of the speed you can in a field in Cornwall.

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.

Proxy ?

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

Hadn't appreciated Lyons and the LEO as much until our event at the Computing Museum. They were absolutely amazing.

x86 and modern browsers deserve each other

Both are incredibly over-complicated messes with thousands of variants and bits stuck on even if they're all supposedly to a standard. Nobody truly understands them or the security implications.

What's the (military) risk of the UK havings its cables cut?

Now we're sending NHS data across the pond this isn't so good.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD whatever release was delayed by a full year for similar reasons.

Response

Putting aside issues of confidentiality for a moment, response times for hosting in the US are going to be significantly worse than for Europe. Laws of physics or something. I'd like to see a politician argue otherwise.

It's not just about backups. It's also sensible permissions like not allowing old fixed documents to be trashed. Also versioning file-systems (such as ZFS). Mostly common sense.

Isn't me_cleaner a case of stable and bolted horse ?

Same here

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.

Add randomness

So when malware adds random time delays and payload ?

VAX ?

I’d like to see this as an opportunity for non x86 even IBM with Power or Z, ARM, VAX...

Nothing against AMD but it’s flogging the dead x86 horse.

This E73 desktop

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.

Maggie did

Maggie Thatcher did ban Arthur Anderson from future government work. Labour undid that.

Or what ? We’ll stop taking your gas we have become so dependent upon ?

Stop blaming ruskies and NK for NHS incompetence.

Noooo not another disto please. If you like UNIX then forget Linux altogether. It’s a horrible mess. Suggest FreeBSD as an operating system that actually contains a user land rather than it being taped on from GNU. For the best by some measure of both worlds Debian kFreeBSD.

Classes

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.

JJeffs is right.

The "range" is the total battery lifetime so 100,000 miles or whatever. NOT what we normally call range between charges.

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.

As we move towards proper web apps the current app fad should hopefully die and be replaced by yet more browser security problems. But at least we'll have a (small) choice of which over-complicated insecure web browser to run. A quadopoly perhaps.

I suspect what is optimistically called a "spec sheet" above was a 200,000 page document written by those paid by the page that nobody understood so they simply signed it and passed it on.