Posts by Giovani Tapini 575 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2018
that in the case of these disks, they actually get smaller as they get harder... down from a good floppy 8 inches down to a good firm 3.5 inches. The irony...
I kept the 5.25 version of "Elite" from my old BBC master just to show people of the future how your could store about 0.001% of their thumb drive...
Back in the old days when I was working on iSeries machines the OS and compilers conspired to allocate and clear memory for thread activations. You had to positively code for sharing memory between processes. Back even in those days, this was called "legacy" by other developers in my world, and now the legacy is no longer a legacy although their is now a new language/platform to play with implementing the same techniques.
I always considered C and its variants quite a low level language positively designed to be relatively uninhibited in its behaviours and rather an odd choice for normal business applications. Maybe a good choice for people interfacing with hardware, but peculiar for someone that only needs a GUI and database to work nicely.
Cue flame war from people that insist all modern code should be in Visual PROLOG or... hold on whatever happened to all those 4GL development platforms in the early 2000's that claimed to make coding itself irrelevant...
You know, the really funny thing is, that if Huawei stop using Android it directly compromises the potential for data harvesting by US social media/advertising firms (and uncle sam by proxy) from the platform as consumers would have to opt-in rather than be collected by default.
Its a funny old world nowadays
"multiple diverse routes, provided by multiple service providers" were all broken as a result of the attacks on the WTC years ago. Turns out they all used the same comms route there.
Also raised questions about the secrecy of the physical routes used by the different providers as there was no way of actually assuring diverse routing (and may still not be, its not my thing now)
If however the break is on Google's premises then my sympathetic stance will transform rapidly into the WTF category...
err... You do realise the MoD runs its own police service don't you, these investigate regular criminal activities in many cases? And also that many military operations are more like armed policing than simply spraying bullets everywhere...
I suggest they probably do have good grounds to access the database for at least some of these purposes. It is however likely that the law has not caught up to clearly give or deny their access either. This means the challenge is correct, but the blind assumption that they should not be using the database is a bit naive..
Big blue box "continue & log in" (aka let us harvest your data and link it to other providers..) and tiny white text on black background "proceed without registering". I have to say its an art this sort of thing, but I don't like it. Consumers cannot be savvy in everything
To fork the OS and separate the 32 & 64 bit architecture leaving an LTS branch for 32 bit. I don't see 32 bit going away, niche use cases they may be becoming, but lots of it out their.
I imagine it is getting increasingly complex trying to bind too many architectures into one place, as the behaviours are increasingly divergent.
on the we have been videoing you looking at pr*n send bitcoin so we don't prosecute/send to all your contacts extortion .
I am sure this type of scam will go through a wide variety of variants from the we (insert authoritative sounding organisation here) know what you did as a student, to your use of unlicensed music/software, to we have been spying on you via your phone for weeks, to we are watching you through the window now... It will always work on a few people as you probably only need one or two to fall for it to break even on your criminal costs.
Upsetting to some, but not very original..
I worked at one place where the security system was not just an inconvenience, and failure to prop-open the firedoors actively stopped the organisation from functioning.
Picture a secure datacentre with access via airlock/tube doors. Extra feature was a weight test to ensure you didn't walk out with kit....
The challenge, you walk in with a case full of tapes, you load them into the drives, then you cannot leave because there is too much difference between your entry and exit weight... Cue propping of firedoors to allow tape librarians to function without being imprisoned for a weekend...
That one extra control downgraded access controlled, airlock doors to propped open doors to external car park with no access controls at all. You couldn't make it up...
I have dealt with a few that would not have allowed this recovery and would have resulted in complete loss...
We have all done "something" on the wrong system though, myself included, although my turn was luckily entirely transparent to service...
I believe this is a bit premature/inaccurate unless the administration has been watching videos of people playing Fallout games and mistaking it for the news...
China for, all its faults, is a significant part of many supply chains and is clearly acceptable to many businesses. I don't like these US tactics that are increasingly simple bullying than any useful form of managing risks.
It can be very good for customer relations and get rid of annoyances. You do however have to have the knowledge or experience to assess if it really is a 5 minute favour...
Although not 5 minutes, I was once asked to do a "simple code upgrade" moving some customised features to a new version of our codebase. This was expected to only take a few hours of cut'n'paste and a little tweaking. After looking at it I discovered that the original engineer had no idea what he was doing, the code clearly didn't work, wasn't fully marked up etc etc. By the time I realised it would have been quicker to have simply started from scratch it was 50 50 to restart or finish fixing the code monster from the previous engineer. This was a good life lesson for me at the time, to treat all "small" requests with caution...
You may fairly safely assume that the bulk mailing is outsourced. Its been years since I've worked anywhere that prints locally anything other than one-off letters.
I have almost never seen any bulk output in its physical form, its all overcomplicated with "inserts" and sorting for cheaper posting etc. This however is the source of the problem as its impossible to test in that setup.
@thondwe The point is that it is a philosophical question.
It is however an interesting question, as if you have a "mobile" workload i.e. its in a VM package for a reason i.e. pricing, burst capacity etc in favour of a native PaaS as you suggest. The licencing will be problematic. In this case it may be any CPU that has ever existed would be more definable that just any in the world...
In my place, even the idea of keeping a solution in a known working state is called old school thinking. Apparently now everything is disposable minimum viable product and service life is simply until it's replacement arrives.
This will keep software people busy forever but creates anarchy for anyone trying to look at security or platform roadmap, or how archive data may may be accessed...
It's a strange world I am moving into
That sounds about right.
Open source, particularly in bigger projects can have far more visibility, testing and shorter remediation times. This is great, however, this is countered by do I trust those libraries maintained by a retired guy and his cat? Have all the relied upon libraries been maintained. Who is looking out for poor quality or malicious code changes? If I find a problem with a library can I get someone to fix it or do I have to attempt to fix it myself?
This is why enterprises go to red-hat (or equivalents) , and are generally not encouraging random code downloads of code stumbled across on the internet.
Open source is a very flexible world, albeit with a common aim, so its no wonder the answers look a bit conflicted.
Do you come out all shiny and lacquered like a new car? Does it put extra shine on the undercarriage? Sounds like it may be a bit much for me.
I just recall toilets on the train in china which was essentially a hole in the floor of the carriage with the track flying past underneath. You would not retrieve your dropped mobile from that one... This was also the carriage with a boiling water tap (for the ubiquitous tea) at child reaching height with even adult splashing tendencies when switched on.
@sitta_europea
does not need much wizardry, its a weakness of the old protocol really. If you change the process too much there will be no back compatibility for the billions of devices out there. This would probably mean the no adoption at all, even if better. This is a battle IT will never win, as backward compatibility protocol "downgrades" appear in all sorts of places.
I've seem the small charred fragments (some still reading "23000v") from an exploded UPS cabinet, complete with the expensive smells associated.
I also recall being told by our site engineer at another job, that the switches used to swap between external power, generator, and batteries also wear out fairly quickly and are not intended to cope with repeated use. Test the, or use them, either way seems perilous. I quickly arranged for the site engineers to be part of the CAB process where all sorts of entertaining discussions came to the table.
Change xxx on day yyy, that's a Sunday so that'll be quiet... Site engineer says "Water will be off that day, so don't use the toilets and bring your own drinking water, that's our scheduled disinfection of tanks etc." so it worked both ways... I learned a lot more than I ever thought I needed to know about the engineering behind my facility at that role.
I remember the first ever night I was on call, also on a system that "never" went down... Guess what - it did. The problem with systems that never go down is that there is very little experience to draw on on WTF to do next without making things worse. In this case the system, also on an AS/400 curiously enough was managing financials for multiple large pension funds, so no pressure.
Called my backup - no response. Waited 10 mins, called again, still no response so gave up on him. After reverse engineering a fair bit of the solution I managed to work out how to resolve the issue. It took me some time after that to learn how to sleep with a pager....
TBH That reminds me of most mainframe techs of that era... I started to learn that they were mostly like that. Their mistakes could be hidden behind what they believed you would never discover, file extension limits reached, lack of MIPS etc.
It was around this time I also discovered that mainframe software was NEVER optimised. The answer every year was, just to buy more MIPS. Lots of life lessons learned about how the mainframe budget being so much bigger also meant far fewer questions were asked about business cases or value for money that I was routinely punished with for asking for anything.
She "may be the daughter of..." letting someone in... social engineering, no she wasn't even pretending, but the guy wasn't even sure of her identity so no talent on either side.
My experience of Chinese IT the presence of malware is common, not necessarily intentional.
This sounds like a chain of amateur screw-ups being blown up out of proportion to divert the inevitable blamestorming...
That although this helps research other attacks it's also useful for low level code design and optimisation if you are at the kernel or compiler level.
We can't have it both ways where a technology can be both optimised and hidden at the same time.
I hope this just improves the checking of said low level code...
Will it translate teen "ugh" and "meeeer" sounds as they get up at 2pm?
Will it be used to record all the other things you think about like a sort of non-verbal thought reader? Isn't it bad enough already that you have to shout at a grubby plastic dome to call down the shopping gods because you can't be arsed to get out of your armchair? No? you would rather go round your house looking like you are becoming an early adopter of the BORG having your under-the-breath mutterings captured by the hive?
No now you will voluntarily submit to having all those "sub-vocal" communications recorded and potentially replayed where you used to say under your breath "what a ****wit ****** is!" while you were in the kitchen, now it can be innocently blurted out by the machines for you.
Who on earth wants this technology? Given that most AI's think a Scottish accent is a fatal speech impediment I don't hold out much confidence for the people who have genuine and often "non-standard" challenges with speech or worse ... grammar. Good luck Yoda with your "four hundred toilet rolls there will be master Luke".
And as for using parts of the car as a speaker diaphragm. Although technically possible, has anyone thought this through? Anything touching the dashboard will start to move, keys, coins, the pile of general matter in the glovebox will start to bounce to your tunez. Even for relatively modestly powered systems that don't require underlighting on your car can bounce coins 4-5 centimetres if placed on the diaphragm. think about it just for a moment. You are approaching the toll bridge, fumble around for the change, put it on the dash and it's fired back at you and all over the car like confetti while you are doing 70 in the wrong lane.
Try door panels at least, they are marginally more likely to make a stereo output without doing more than shaking the can of lemonade you put in the door pocket.
Just because these things can be done, does not make them sensible or useful.
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