* Posts by A Non e-mouse

3264 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2010

Overzealous n00b takes out point-of-sale terminals across the UK on a Saturday afternoon

A Non e-mouse Silver badge

Re: AS/400 UPS

Sounds like their SFT-III add-on for Netware.

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Re: AS/400 UPS

I've been to vendor demos where they say that their system is fully fault tolerant and it can survive bits being switched off.

The look of horror on their faces as I reach for some random cables to unplug is always quite amusing.

Note to vendors: If you claim your system is fault tolerant, I *will* test your claims - and not in a nice controlled shutdown manner either.

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Joke

Re: You should have been sacked

Just remember: One in a million chances occur 99% of the time...

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Re: AS/400 UPS

the bearings ceased when it spun down and cooled

I had a similar problem one time with a server: The main data disc won't spin up after a controlled power off. The head of IT was getting stressed by the downtime, knowing a full restore onto a new HDD (once it arrived) would take a long time.

The head of IT started to panic when I got a hammer out!

A light touch to the side of the HDD was enough to release the bearings and the disc spun up OK. More backups were rapidly taken whilst we waited for an engineer to arrive with a new HDD.

Autonomy's financial reports? I didn't even read KPMG's due-diligence, says ex-HP CEO Léo Apotheker

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Re: Delegating

When looking at a take-over, you shouldn't just be looking at what the accountants say. You'll be looking closing at how it fits into your product mix. You'll be looking at their back office systems. Maybe looking at their organisation's culture. I'm sure lawyers will have something to say too.

Your job as the CEO is to take the advise from all of these people in your company, plus listen advice from your non-exec board members to make the final call. And if the call is wrong, to learn from the mistake and fall on your sword.

Mozilla tries to do Java as it should have been – with a WASI spec for all devices, computers, operating systems

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But a write-once, run anywhere binary represents a worthwhile effort

Or a security nightmare.

The tech lawsuit of the year: HPE v Mike Lynch and Sushovan Hussain

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If the case is expected to last until December, you're probably going to need lots of caffeine to keep awake.

Blighty's most trusted brand? Yeah, you wish, judge tells Post Office in Horizon IT system ruling

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Re: 'twas ever thus

They got that from BT.

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The price of stamps has gone up much faster than inflation

But the price of stamps isn't set by the Post Office but by the Royal Mail*. Different business.

* Yes - I realise that OFCOM has a hand in this too.

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Re: Wrongly convicted ? Fuck off.

Here's just one example: The Birmingham Six. They got between £840,000 and £1.2 million each.

Geiger counters are so last summer. Lasers can detect radioactive material too, y'know

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Re: Wait, what?

If I underrstand this correctly...

The seed electron weakly attaches itself to an oxygen molecule. This makes this molecule negatively charged as it now has an excess electron. As the electron is only weakly attached, the laser can easily liberate this electron.

So perhaps the author could have said "[...] laser can liberate those seed electrons"

Autopilot engineer drove off to Chinese rival with our top-secret blueprints in the glovebox, Tesla claims in sueball

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Mushroom

RTFA:

"...one of only about 40 employees out of 45,000 granted access to Tesla's neural-network source code"

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Re: Fool me once...

Stealing engineers (and what is in their head) is fair play. It's the stealing of engineer's output that is a tad naughty.

PuTTY in your hands: SSH client gets patched after RSA key exchange memory vuln spotted

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Re: "basically operated by one volunteer in charge of a small team of volunteers"

See the developer statistics for the 5.0 kernel over at lwn.net.

Intel top the charts as the biggest contributor to the 5.0 kernel. Depending on how you chop the statistics, Facebook, Red Hat, IBM & Google (Among others) appear in the top ten too.

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Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

I think you're being a little harsh here. The Microsoft of 2019 is not the Microsoft of Balmer's era.

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Re: PuTTY's days are numbered

One of the best reasons to upgrade to the latest version of Windows (server or desktop) is that it now comes with OpenSSH built-in

This passed me by. According to this MS article, it's in Windows 10 & Server 2019 as of autumn 2018.

It would be nice if they back ported it to Server 2016.

Windows XP point-of-sale machine gets nasty sniffle. Luckily there's a pharmacy nearby

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Updating embedded XP

updating a fleet of POS terminals presents its own particular set of challenges

Why? The hardware base is going to be very limited in variability and the system is pretty much locked down. So building an image for the device shouldn't be too hard.

This is the Send, encrypted end-to-end, this is the Send, my Mozillan friend

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Re: The devil with all this stuff is in the details

Whose got the keys?

RTFA: Just the people with the download URL. As the client software runs locally in your browser, Mozilla can't see it by default.

Astroboffins spot hefty pair swinging together. What? Um, we're talking about record-breaking massive binary stars...

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Thumb Up

I love science.

Microsoft tweaks Windows 10 on Arm64 to play nicely with KVM

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Do I see ice crystals forming in Hell?

Is this the way the cookie wall crumbles? Dutch data watchdog says nee to take-it-or-leave-it consent

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Re: God bless the Dutch

GDPR (Like any law or regulation) will only work if the authorities actually enforce it and there are meaningful consequences for non-compliance.

Google finally touts $150 pint-sized Linux dev board with Edge TPU AI math copro brains

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FAIL

Tensoflow for mobiles

So Google’s aim is to allow distributed machine learning while protecting privacy.

Who trusts Google to understand what “privacy” actually is?

The first ZX Spectrum prototype laid bare... (What? It was acceptable in the '80s)

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Re: Just use emulation

The thing I loved about the old 8-bit micros was that you could understand & program everything. The manuals gave you so much detail too. I'd love to tinker with something like that nowadays.

I still dream of building my own small machine - just for the pleasure, not because I think I can do it better than anyone else. But modern things like USB, HDMI, ethernet, etc. make that practically impossible.

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Re: 16K

16k sounds like nothing now

I remember there being a chess program that ran on the 1K ZX81.

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16K

Not that there is an awful lot one can actually do with a 16k ZX Spectrum

I seem to recall that Jetpac was one of the few games that only needed 16k.

USB4: Based on Thunderbolt 3. Two times the data rate, at 40Gbps. One fewer space. Zero confusing versions

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Re: LumpSpeed

I'm no RF engineer, but as USB is only a short range interconnect you can probably get away with it. Also, it might not really be running at, say 40Gb/s, but maybe something like 4 x 10 Gb/s.

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

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Re: Make them an offer?

I believe the issue with continuing with the ISS is its running costs. It's getting on a bit and needs quite a bit of maintenance. I seem to recall that NASA, et al, have been touting around for commercial companies to take it on, but no-one wants to.

If you want an orbiting garage, then you'd probably be better off starting with something new.

The other issue is: Where is the fuel coming from? If it's coming from Earth, what are you saving by sending the fuel & vehicle up separately?

Ah, this military GPS system looks shoddy but expensive. Shall we try to break it?

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Re: wasting taxpayers' cash

This happens all the time in the public sector. It's because whenever you buy (or sell) anything, you have to go through processes to show that you're obtaining the best price/not taking a back hander.

The problem is that the processes can be such a pain in the rear that it's simpler to just waste money than get better value for money.

I say, that sucks! Crooks are harnessing hoovers to clean out parking meters in Chelsea

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Re: Where did they get the power?

Or they could just be using cordless vacuum cleaners. They've been around for decades but are starting to go a bit more mainstream.

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Flame

NCP

I've twice recently had the unfortunate pleasure of trying to deal with NCP parking machines. These machines do have card readers (both chip & contactless)

On both occasions, it took me over 10 minutes to pay for my parking because the machines are so badly designed.

It never ceases to amaze me how companies can produce such bad IT that's intended for the general public to use.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

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First They Ignore You,

Then They Laugh at You,

Then They Attack You,

Then You Win

How do you solve a problem like Galileo? With a strap-on L-band payload, of course!

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But since when has logic featured in the arguments over Brexit Government's thinking?

FTFY

Password managers may leave your online crown jewels 'exposed in RAM' to malware – but hey, they're still better than the alternative

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Baby & Bathwater

Several commentards are coming up with ways on how to make password managers better (or something better than a password manager) Let's not forget the basic piece of advice: Using a password manager (With their design flaws) and having unique, strong passwords for every website is still a heck of a lot better than using the same poorly chosen passwords a

Twilight of the sundials: Archaic timepiece dying out and millennials are to blame, reckons boffin

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Dr King

I've not had the pleasure of meeting Dr King, but I've heard he's a thoroughly interesting chap (& Boffin). Maybe El Reg could do an interview with him?

Crash, bang, wallop: What a power-down. But what hit the kill switch?

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Unhappy

Re: Placement of kill switch and other quirks

In one of our machine rooms, the light switch is right next to the EPO button. We've asked and asked for them to be separated, but our requests are falling on deaf ears.

(Yes, the EPO has been accidentally hit)

London's Met police confess: We made just one successful collar in latest facial recog trial

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Flame

Statistics

To truly evaluate the effectiveness of the facial recognition tech you need several pieces of information:

- How many people were innocent and flagged as not wanted.

- How many people where innocent yet flagged as wanted.

- How many people were wanted and flagged as wanted.

- How many people were wanted but not flagged as wanted

I grant that the final figure is really hard to get, but if it's a trial you should be able to measure all of these to a reasonable degree of accuracy so you can make a meaningful evaluation. If you take it even further, you could look at the amount of police time running the trial and compare it to other methods of finding people of interest. Is having a plod or two or three sitting around all day and make just one arrest a really good use of police resources?

But around here, we know what the public sector is like for undertaking honest & meaningful statistical analysis.

Not cool, man: Dixons spanked over discount on luxury 'smart' fridge with wildly fluctuating price

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Flame

DFS

So when are the ASA going to stamp on DFS (And other furniture retailers) for their also permanent sale?

Intel to finally scatter remaining ashes of Itanium to the wind in 2021: Final call for doomed server CPU line

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Design Flaw

Someone over at Ars pointed out one of the big flaws in the Itanic design: Intel assumed that the compiler would be able to better parralllelize instructions that the CPU could at runtime. The problem with that, is that the compiler will never be able to tell what tier of memory (cache, main, swap) a memory access might be.

Swiss Public Prosecutor will probe WIPO's misconduct allegations against CIO, says his legal counsel

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From El Reg Passum, the European Patent Office has its own share of "problems".

Is there something in the patent circles that leads people to behave like dicks?

World's favourite open-source PDF interpreter needs patching (again)

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Alternatives

If we're being encouraged not to use Ghostscript for manipulating/converting EPS & PS files, what other options are there?

(I'm interested in API/Command Line solutions. Fancy GUIs need not apply)

When something's weird in your ImageMagick upload, who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters!

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Re: Kudos for stepping up to the plate

sanitizing the incoming code should be possible

No

Oz auditor: Number of times failed government biometric project met a milestone = None

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Flame

It always amazes me how big IT projects can go so wrong and no-one seems to take the blame. Yet if one of my small projects ( less than £10K) goes 10% overspend I get a grilling about my budget management skills.

Struggling with GDPR compliance? Don't waste money on legal advice: Buy a shredder

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Happy

Re: snake oil seller indeed

it turned out was a straight lift of documents that other companies had posted on the internet

It wasn't a takeaway they lifted the documents from, by any chance....?

The lighter side of HMRC: We want your money, but we also want to make you laugh

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The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Man drives 6,000 miles to prove Uncle Sam's cellphone coverage maps are wrong – and, boy, did he manage it

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Common Sense

This is one of those times when common sense would say that the maps are complete garbage. Unfortunatley, corporate lawyers don't get paid to defened common sense.

China's really cotton'd on to this whole Moon exploration thing: First seed sprouts in lunar lander biosphere

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Re: I would like to see the aims of the experiment.

I believe the aim is to see if a simple self-contained biosphere can work on the Moon.

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The Tricky Part

Whilst the seeds have to be kept fed and watered in an atmosphere, the trickiest part of this tricky stuff is the temperature control. The temperature variation between when the moon is sun facing and and non-sun facing is quite large (Several hundred degrees C)

HSBC suggests it might have found a... use for blockchain?

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Truth

shared, single version of the truth of intra-company trades

Because blockchains are immune to people fiddling the system, aren't they...

Oh, maybe not...

Computing boffins strip the fun out of satirical headlines

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Re: Private-Eye hacks worried?

Just ask the Dane's how well satire travels.

Huawei's 5G security scrutiny pain could be Cisco's gain – analysts

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Joke

Re: Summary

Cisco have the backdoors we can live with

Cisco have the backdoors we've paid for...