Posts by Dronius

Microsoft declares 2025 'the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh'

I was a skeptic bound by inertia but now I'm convinced it's worth the effort.

The company made the move last autumn & the actual transition appeared painless, until you looked under the hood & saw the kind of sleight of hand enshittification that had been pulled, then had to unpick all the poisoned darts that had been stuck in your machine.

Making W11 vaguely useable now takes almost as much keyboard bashing as a Linux install ..... so this year is when I move everything windows to Linux at home.

I use Linux at work ok where necessary (it's good for systems that back in the day used to have a dedicated lump of hardware & need to chug along doing their simple work without being tripped up)

My main objection to doing it at home before was I couldn't be arsed as I have a life to live.

But now MS have made the whole effort seem equivalent, it's probably worth setting aside a weekend to get one of the older machines moved over & all the alternative apps installed as a pilot demo for the missus to assess.

It's time I will no longer begrudge given the dystopian future that MS seem to have looming for me if I don't jump.

AI Jesus is ready to dispense advice from a booth in historic Swiss church

I don't care if it rains or freezes long as I got my plastic Jesus

Sittin' on the dashboard of my car

Going down there, it ain't scary 'cause I've got the virgin Mary

Sittin' on the dashboard of my car

I'm in the backseat sinning, Jesus up there grinning

Sittin' on the dashboard of my car

Green, white, pink or yellow, I don't care 'cause he's my feller

Sittin' on the dashboard of my car

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

Dress for the occasion (al mishap)

Full Shroud Desirable

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

My solution is to crimp a cable tie in a pair of RJ45 connectors then label them the same number & cut the tie.

you do that for about 10 or so pairs. then as you unplug the first cable, you plug in marker 1 & ditto at the other end. you can then carry on until you run out of pairs, do your tidying/re-cabling for each pair as you go. Then rinse & repeat until done.

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

2. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

3. Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.

4. Boot the host normally.

Waymo robotaxi drives down wrong side of street after being alarmed by unicyclists

Why does it think it has to pass?

Is it programmed to believe its hurry should be someone else's problem?.

"Wait Waymo, down boy, sit!"

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Soccerist?

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

It's probably not just reluctance to upgrade. More and more people only hop on a PC or Laptop for work now, so they take what's chucked at them by the corporation.

Many small business users I know have gone away from dedicated PC based machines to using web hosted payment and accounting, booking, web & communication software accessed from a fondle-slab or smart phone.

So perhaps MS have given up on trying to bring those mass market prior users with them and just reckon folks have already largely junked the PC or lappy as a means of useful access to the world.

I can't see too many non-techie or non-tied users bothering to upgrade a piece of rarely used kit that just demands endless needy maintenance like some whingeing child.

Nope the money will go towards buying interfaces and gubbins to make the small form units feel like the old PC, without the need to maintain multiple machines and pay ridiculous license fees & even more subs every year.

The old sort of customers are already walking away from the MS game playing before this hits home.

It's only we technobodies who can't yet do without them.... but give it time & there'll be messages from on high that we're to move to a more "modern", "dynamic", "flexible" approach (read less costly in licenses) that relies on remotely accessing virtualised versions of what we now call the PC or Laptop via a cheaper to run mobile interface, with a few shared on-site machines for legacy machine bashing & set-ups.

Astronomers spot collision between two exoplanets, both feared vaporized

Somehow Gag Halfrunt & Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz have got to be involved in this.

Meta's data-hungry Threads skips over EU but lands in Britain

Looking at the list it seems that Apple App Store believe that if you agree to consent to the terms then Meta & their group / customers get access to "Contacts", as in their app. Apple does not indicate any limit on the information shared from Contacts so they must just open the door once granted as there's no granular data selection options in the app or privacy setting . I presume this means Meta or whoever you share contacts with currently get the lot. So anyone consenting to use Threads or Instagram is allowing their entire contact information to be shared without any consultation or consent from the people concerned.

If you have friends in the EU or covered by the GDPR then you'd be in breach of these laws by signing up to the apps without your contacts expressly opting in to allowing you to do so.

By that measure the UK (with our current legislation) is already in breach of it's own laws by allowing the Threads & Instagram to proceed unchecked. As for "adequacy" for protection of any EU citizen contacts, that's gone as of the launch & however many infringing UK sign ups have happened already.

Oh, great. Yet another tech billionaire thinks he can get microblogging right

The vacuum of vacuousness just got even sucking bigger

Because the chirpers needed a bigger vacuum nozzle thrust into those meaningful and wholesome lives.

Users complain over UK state-owned bank's services as Atos eyes the exit

I got in that loop for a while, then entered the 2F code but went back to the original email link and used that & it went straight in. Surely that's dodgy after a few code sends and attempts to get in?

NYC Mayor: Robo-pup 'out of the pound' and back to police work

I'd love to see some creative yarn-boming of a K5.

You could knit a tea-cosy with big bobbly ears and just pop it over the trundling phallus for shits'n'giggles.

Some strategically placed holes and it might pootle about for hours without the operator knowing.

UK spy agency: Don't feed LLMs with sensitive corporate data

Re: Know who should be worried ? Boris.

I reckon it missed the chance to drop in a Greek or Latin aphorism or biblical phrase welcoming the stranger.

A properly trained BorisBot would pepper the place with slightly off-kilter versions that would highlight his erudition and education but do little to further the question in hand.

That and a few Pah! woof, wazaaa interjections could give it a proper whiff of authenticity.

Wazooo watto, ha! boff.

Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla

Re: Tesla Model 3

Maybe the next hack will be to make them all "go home" to the mother factory one morning.....

could be time for another watch of "La Cabina" ........ https://pin.it/71NTri3

Microsoft wants to export 'grid-interactive' Dublin datacenter setup

Re: Functional collision?

Load shedding contracts are normal stuff nowadays. They are planned and scrutinised very closely as they have many "slippery-fish" clauses which keep CEO/CFO types up at night.

Normally companies involved have their own grading of loads they'll allow to be reduced or just voltage dropped in different demand scenarios. Those loads are then contracted out in return for beneficial tariffs and/or compensatory payments. This situation would appear to be a version of that in reverse, where in given circumstances the stored load can be bought back. I would assume the tariffs are graded depending how far into the resource the distribution company are dipping. There'll always be a limit beyond which no more is supplied due to the need you mention.

If anything it's more likely to lead to over-speccing of UPS systems beyond where they would have previously been cost effective, giving companies enhanced protection much of the time & only dipping back to previous levels of protection when drawn down. Similar things happen with solar generation sites where they get over specced in terms of output, with storage, to take the excess and flatten out the load curve either end of the day. That has a knock-on benefit in winter as the higher output is available during the peak, where a smaller system specced for year round averages would miss out. In a way MS are just being an enhanced battery for the green energy generators and getting a slice of the action without having to invest in the actual generation technology.

I hope the grid management software isn't theirs. On a day of a district level failure, you're going to be relying of that smart system being very smart if you're going to stay up.

Microsoft grows automated assault disruption to cover BEC, ransomware campaigns

Next year's headline anyone?;

Hackers "also can customize how automatic attack disruption is configured and change an action via the Microsoft 365 Defender Portal. ®"

Chinese surveillance balloon over US causes fearful gasbagging

Is this a GoodYear for Chinese surveillance?

Re: 99 Red Balloons

Yup they're a bit vague & maybe that's the real purpose of the balloon;

It is possible that the owners don't want to be bluffed by potentially tampered information, so might check out the currents for themselves and get their own data to compare with officially published info.

After all if wargaming wanted to model chemical or radiation spread pathways across the US, then they'd need proper info on the latest trends.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

https://www.motoringresearch.com/features/cost-car-year-born/

Motor, October 1948, the Ford Anglia was the cheapest four-wheel car in Britain at £310 (£10,703 in today’s money using their conversion)

1951 Austin A30 would have set you back £507 (£17,504 in today’s money)

Average house price in 1950 was £1,940 (£66,980 in today’s money: cue howling at the moon here)

So early 1950’s when motoring really began to take off in Britain, a house was 5.54 cheaper in today’s terms than October 2022’s figure of £371,158.

There was also a lot of house scarcity then too, but less domestic property speculation, stricter financing terms and less foreign money investing in property.

Can we relate the two periods? Possibly, but these things are never straightforward, so comparing it to a house price won’t help much. Financing, regulation of ownership, taxation etc. are very different nowadays plus the numbers in these historical comparison formulae never seem to relate to the actuality on the ground.

If we do stack the car price numbers up against each other;

Pitching the Ford Fiesta as a current petrol equivalent of the Anglia; the 2022 OTR price is £20770 (up 19% on 2019) as against £10,703 just about ½ the equivalent price for a similar market niche.

Possibly a sign of the complexity involved in designing, producing and financing modern cars, or something else?

https://www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/car-market-1/2022-03/2022-new-car-prices-rise-by-up-to-26-per-cent/

The electric cars are less complex to produce and maintain than their petrol equivalents.

The software & interface level is complex for both ICE and E cars but similar to implement in a build once developed.

So now if you go one step beyond the historical ICE cars into modern electric equivalents what’s happening to enable something like a Nissan Leaf or Renault Zoe to sell for just under £30,000?

Front loading of all the development costs? differences in financing? construction material scarcity? absorption of grants into profits? demand pressure from supplying a new market from very low base levels?

I’ve been scratching my head over this one for a few years & beginning to think it’s some kind of parallel of what we have witnessed in the mobile phone market with ever more gizmodified units being used to leverage premium pricing.

Equinix to cut costs by cranking up the heat in its datacenters

Re: We make a rod for our own backs...

Definitely better to move the heat out of the enclosures, with proper standards you can have something like 12,9,5,3 v distributed to outlets which in unit modules only pick up the required voltages. Higher voltages can be added on more robust outlets, as those are required less frequently and often are further converted to lower voltages, a step which which could be eliminated by proper provision within the input module. You can even design the distribution rails in rack with plug in modules which are only hooked up at required points, no more unnecessary provision of outlets just in case they may be needed.

The actual to rack distribution model we used was a roof rail system which had shuttered inserted rack rail drops. You could even get to the point where the racks are assembled incorporating the rail hook-up / outlet distribution drops.

What we found was that the PSUs were both a point of failure and added a chunk of heat which could be easily eliminated. By the time the multiple PSUs were totted up it was a real eye-opener. Not having to provide & maintain multiple PSUs across whole rack rooms was also a potential cost saver.

The other advantage was that UPS maintenance and transition in DC voltage rails would be more robust.

It's a bird that never flew because of circumstances back in the day, but there were many advantages there for the picking.

We make a rod for our own backs...

We need to stop converting AC to DC at the rack unit and deliver DC power rails to racks. Even with our very efficient PSUs they generate a good chunk of waste heat, right at the point where it's most burdensome (within the server unit)

Standardisation of DC input modules on server frames would allow this to be moved out of the most vulnerable locations and enable efficient heat harvesting.

Move the AC-DC conversion out to the same space as the air-con heating battery and harvest it there to offset the localised heat requirements within the air con & heat recovery systems.

That would prevent a lot of heat being generated in the server rooms, and the subsequent need to extract it again, with lossy recovery or completely wasteful exhaust systems, leaving more capacity for the actual cooling needs of the processors etc. within those server rooms.

Could we ever get server manufacturers to provide DC-DC swap-in modules to replace our current PSUs to facilitate this?

I think if there was enough research into the potential savings in more efficient centalised AC-DC conversion/distribution and the potential offset through waste heat harvesting, we might get a build up of sufficient customer demand to prod the manufacturers.

The down side is that without a proper industry / IEC standards at the outset, we'd have them all trying to do proprietary systems and that would take years to settle down.

I wrote an internal paper on this for our corporate group 15 years ago, but then they off-loaded us from their mega corp to another mega corp and all the momentum was lost. The copyright and patents would I suppose now be disputed between both mega corporations if anyone ever rattled that cage. Inertia wins again :(

Neuralink's AI brain chip could be in humans within six months claims Elon Musk

Re: I can miss this ..

The tech support calls for this are going to be a goldmine.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

Re: Sure both of them didn’t have to cope with a system …

Time Lords Leaping....

https://media.immediate.co.uk/volatile/sites/3/2017/08/95885.jpg

US Supreme Court asked if cops can plant spy cams around homes

So we're going to google "bride's bush rentals"

...... oh heck!

Airline 'in talks' with Kyndryl after failed network card grounds flights

Our latest outages triggered no alarms on the fibre circuits from our providers.

The reason was that both paths (main and backup on each discreet provider pathway (x4)) had bit rate present, so the automated monitoring never triggered an alarm, so the automatic fail-over never did 'fail-over'.

It was only when the content analyser was pointed at a suspect stream that the fault was identified by us.

Even then there was doubt due to a fight between the auto fail-over system at one hub and each subsequent one in the chain.

Each one failed over to the alternative so the upstream fault was not revealed.

So many compounding fibre providers, each with their own system cobbling together pathways, managed to mask the source fault from the automated fail-over systems. The thing is we commission from a provider but until the thing goes pear-shaped the details of sub-providers are unknown for 'commercial reasons'

Meta busts first Chinese campaign prodding US midterms

Re: Geofencing?

MachDiamond

"Those wishing to get into political debate will first need to do some sort of verification as a way to prevent rouge user accounts"

Its enough to make one blush.

Hurricane Ian blows NASA Artemis Moon launch into October or November

Epic story soon to be the stuff of legends. Dear deer.

Atremis, goddess of vegetation..... gets blown into the weeds.

Didn't she stop the winds and strand a fleet of ships? maybe this time she'll be defeated by a Hera-cane.

Security needs to learn from the aviation biz to avoid crashing

Re: Until someone has to go to jail for doing it wrong?

The onus definitely needs to be at the CFO/CEO level.

That's where the corporate culture is set, financial decisions on whether to spend on quality or divert to dividend are made.

Everyone else is just dancing to the CEO/CFO piper's tune.