Posts by Adrian Harvey

Re: Dog Fight

I agree with much of what you say, but think I should note that the PO and the Royal Mail are NOT the same organisation. The organisation that uses Horizon and messed up so many lives is not the one that delivers the mail - it's the one that runs the post offices and counters, where you can buy stamps and get drivers licenses, etc. The delivery is done by Royal Mail, and they are a different organisation, have never touched Horizon, and have their own problems. Your issues with mail delivery are issues with a different company from the one on trial here.

I know it's weird that they are separate companies, but it's been that way since the passage of the Post Office Act in 1969 (and arguably before that as Royal Mail and Post office branches were both parts of the General Post Office)

Re: Not rude, but bizarre

init

You shouldn't invoke init directly. Always use telinit(8) to change the system runlevel.

Re: Pointless if potless

Standard US sockets, cables are 15A, so at 110V that’s ~1600W max kettle power. In the UK kettles are mostly 3000W so boil water in about half the time it takes in the US.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any - but they are less popular. Also, stove-top kettles are more common than in the UK - stoves have lots more power (or may be gas)

Re: I am enjoying this dispute

> Michelangelo was an artist, the pope who hired him obviously couldnt paint or sculpt...

Fascinatingly - Michaelangelo signed every one of the letters (progress reports, etc) he sent to the pope as "Michaelangelo, sculptor" (source: audio guide in the Cistine Chapel) as he didn't really want to do the painting! Carving things was his preferred work.

I wonder if that actually makes the management in this case smart? - they got amazing work that might not have been done had the worker just been left to his own preferences....

It’s actually an extract from a guitar piece called Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. Though that itself may contain references to earlier work by Chopin.

See https://thenextweb.com/news/where-did-that-nokia-theme-tune-really-come-from

Some other detail is contained in the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_tune

Re: Data General and EMC

Is symcli the one where the “commands” are all just hex codes? I remember seeing the engineers use that on an EMC Symmetrix a long time ago, it seemed like an awful way to work. Very stable and great support, but not easy to make changes on.

Re: 'A reader we’ll Regomize as "Leif"'

I presume he worked for Ericsson?

Or at least used their equipment?

Re: Sun box

I wish the keyboard-based hub was common too! But the USB standard makes it tricky - a standard keyboard only has a low speed cable on it (the kind you can’t buy - they must be moulded to the device). And a hub would need high speed as the downstream interface might be connected to anything…. And to take that further - what happens when someone plugs in something other than a mouse to that port - say a USB drive? And it goes slow…

Now I’m wondering what a keyboard&mouse set would be like if the mouse was hard wired to the keyboard and only one cable to the PC…

Re: Universal... what?

I always liked the touch that there were in fact 2 kinds of cables, low speed and high speed. But you were not allowed to sell low speed cables….

Because low speed cables were only allowed where they were permanently moulded into the device using them (for example, a mouse, or a keyboard).

Most of the advantages of having a cheaper, lower spec cable for the things that only need slow speed. None of the consumer confusion!

Wasn’t the SUN logo readable is all (4) rotations? Or was there an earlier logo that wasn’t?

Re: NMOC

I told my kids that joke when I found an old 3.5” floppy in the attic - my daughter’s reaction was ‘what’s a save icon?’ Growing up in an age of Google Docs and the like she had never seen or used a save icon. That means to some kids even knowing what a save icon is makes you ‘old’. So actual floppy disks are 2 ‘generations’ back I guess….

Re: Buffer overflow DoS attack.

Ok, pedantic mode on…

“ even 0xF0000 to 0xFFFFF was reserved in some boxes.”

0xFFFF0 had to be reserved at the very least as the intel 8086 processor used it as the bootstrap address on power up - it generally contained little more than a jump to the real startup routines, but it had to be there. One of the defined methods for rebooting a PC was to JMP FFFF:0000 (segmented addressing = 0xFFFF0). See Intel_8086_Overview.pdf

“It is IBM PC HARDWARE DESIGN. If you had more than 640 KB the memory from 0xA0000 to 0xFFFFF the memory was "shifted up" by 384 KB. Still remember himem.sys or EMS?”

IBM maybe, but not the PC - the PC could only address 1MB. So it couldn’t really be “shifted up”. EMS involved “shifting sideways” where a segment of memory would be swapped in and out of the upper address space so you could access more than the 1MB, but not all at once.

Re: Inspirational!

In single consent jurisdictions that I know of you still have to be a party to the conversation to record it - so an employer secretly recording would be very clearly illegal as they were not part of the discussion in question.

Re: Uniplex "my God, it chills me just mention the dark lord's name,"

“ They used a Julian date format and had forgotten that 2000 was a leap year, so on day 366 of the year the computer crashed.”

The Julian calendar had all centuries as leap years. Gregorian made centuries not leap years unless divisible by 400. So either way this was just a bug.

Discovering that it is impossible *is* the process of elimination

Re: Build it and they will come...

I don’t think VMWare uses the “recompile model” at all anymore. That model was only necessary to overcome limitations of the x86 model that not all privileged instructions were trapped when running outside ring 0. Some simply failed or just behaved differently. VMWare rewrote those on code load so they could be emulated. Commentators had been saying for a long time that virtualisation was not possible on x86 due to architecture limitations. And the chip designers didn’t see any demand. Once that loop was closed and the architecture extended, VMWare moved to using the hardware virtualisation as it has higher performance.

I don’t know what happens if you run VMWare on a really old CPU now - it may still have the software virtualisation code lingering somewhere, but I suspect it will just refuse to run....

Anyway, a long way of saying that the original VMWare model is probably not necessary on any other CPU as they have had the benefit of seeing the x86 issues and avoiding them.

I know Powershell syntax is odd in some places, and I'm not very keen on it, but the concept of passing the pipeline around as objects is clever and powerful. It avoids having to re-parse data (and, speaking for myself, often incorrectly or without correctly dealing with all the corner cases.)

Are there actually any other shells that implement this concept? Cross platform too?

Re: Yea - give me that random stuff

I’m wondering if you’re reading this differently to the rest of us? I think when they say committed to a repository they mean committed to *your* repository. Not all the repositories of your dependencies.

Re: Good to stay "anonymous"

Frank Abagnale (he of "Catch Me If You Can") wrote "The Art of the Steal" which is a good easy read on fraud techniques and how to prevent them. A little more focus on cheque fraud than necessary in these days of declining cheque use, but still an entertaining read!

Re: This theory always puzzles me

Divers get the bends because the solubility of a gas increases with pressure (actually partial pressure - that is the pressure of that gas alone). More gas dissolves in the blood stream under he higher pressure at depth, and then tries to suddenly form bubbles as the pressure is released when the diver surfaces,

Very similar to soft drinks, but if is the gas is dissolved there aren’t bubbles, microscopic or otherwise. It is only when the ceases to be dissolved that bubbles form.

Incedentally was the beer warm or cool for the test? The liquid temperature has a significant effect on CO2 solubility that’s why there”s no carbonated tea. (Well, not hot tea)

Re: Capitalist pig (green edition)

It really does grow on trees you know!

The country selector really really needs an ‘only from this country’ option, rather than just biasing answers slightly towards your selected country. Sometimes I only want to see results that can actually be delivered without a 4 week delay....

Re: Personal Service Companies

> Not sure what you mean here.

> Assuming you mean raising corp tax levels?

I wasn’t suggesting anything about the level - it’s a few years since I lived there and I don’t know what the current UK rate is!

However I understand that UK dividends are taxed at a low rate separately from the Corp tax paid on the profit, and the poster I was replying to was suggesting fixing that by eliminating Corp tax.

The system in NZ taxes the dividends as Income at the same rate as any other Income you may have. The Corp tax that has been paid is offset against that tax amount owing when the dividend is paid (the process is called imputation) and any additional Income tax still owing is deducted as the dividend is paid.

There are a few corner cases that are dealt with in the tax return and there’s no equivalent to National Insurance in NZ - so that would add complexity, but as a system it’s much fairer, more consistent and harder to exploit than the UK one.

Not per driver, perhaps, but one “hot spare” in the pool wouldn’t be beyond reason. It’s not unlikely that one would be needed to cover mechanical issues, crash repair time, service intervals, etc.

Re: "they haven't found out a way to make a zoom lens flat enough to fit in the phone yet."

Not counting the two that (almost) everyone has :-)