Posts by David Newall

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Impeach him, imprison the other

In my heart of hearts, I was certain the orange one would win the election. I so very much wanted to be wrong but I was right. Perhaps he had the voting machines rigged because it's hard to imagine how around half of the voting public could have wanted him. It was obvious he'd try to destroy the country even before he got his tiny paws back on the nuclear launch codes.

There's a slim chance that the democrats will take back control of both houses in the midterms, and be able to impeach and convict him. In my heart of hearts I'm not at all confident of this outcome, but I really want to be right. They'd be able to run down the list of any Republican sycophant who ascends the throne after him, impeaching and convicting, until an honest one ascends, which pretty much means that no Republican would be left.

Eventually, Congress would be in a position to have the muskrat charged, convicted and imprisoned for high treason, which would be just. He's doing more than anyone bar the arse he licks to destroy the country.

But these things will not come to pass.

What will happen is the tiny-handed narcissist in chief will start WW3. He'll do that to give himself an excuse to stop elections. He'll want to keep the war going until he dies, which, like Hitler before him, will be when the free world wins. Mark my words, even though he forms an axis of evil with Russia and North Korea, USA will lose against the combined might of the free world, albeit China will be neutral.

I hate this vision, but in my heart of hearts I know it to be true.

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

Money is the lifeblood of big business

"Protecting our customers data is our highest priority" is a lie told by almost every large company, everywhere. How can you tell? Because they also say, "the safety of our workers is our highest priority". There are more highest priorities Apparently, corporations can have as many highest priorities as they need. Apparently highest priority just means it's something of which they are aware, and not something that necessarily care about in any way.

Their true highest priority is money and no lie is too big, no act is too immoral or illegal, if there's money in it.

There's a simple reason why Farcebook is the leading antisocial network. They push everyone's unhappy button to make themself richer than Croseus.

I would gladly shut them down in a heartbeat if I could. I would make the world a happier, safer place.

But, they're richer than Croseus and so I will never have that power.

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Re: Licensing is done in phases to take changes into account

You say that as if America's decisions are made by sane people, but they're not. Not for at least another 4 years, probably much longer if the orange O gets his way. Given he was the preferred choice of around half of voting Usanites, I think he won't leave the oval shithole until he's bombed out.

USA used to be such a reliable, sensible country.

One of the last of Bletchley Park's quiet heroes, Betty Webb, dies at 101

Re: National heroes

thanks for reminding me to up vote him or her. The orangutan in chief is the gravest threat to current civilised society.

VMware distributor Arrow says minimum software subs set to jump from 16 to 72 cores

why?

If you've got a perpetual licence, why not just use it in perpetuity?

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save its funding from Trump cuts

Congressionally authorized to counter authoritarian censorship and repressive surveillance

I bet they never expected to use their funds countering home-grown authoritarian censors.

Trump orders all government IT contracts consolidated under GSA

ps f47

that's right. the fucking 47!

Google's Chrome divorce still on the cards as Trump's DoJ plays hardball

Re: I'm confused...

Mightn't it be possible? Possible is possibly too feeble a word.

ASML will open Beijing facility despite US sanctions on China

Re: And so the end run around merrica begins...

Maybe Trump's boss wants that. What's bad for USA is good for Russia.

Nope. You probably can't cash in by turning your office or farm into a datacenter

Unintended consequences

Supercomputers are coming; we get no say in the matter. They will consume enormous amounts of energy, drastically pushing up the price. Actual people, as opposed to the artificial kinds, will pay more so that DC and AI operators can profit. Doesn't seem fair.

Non-biz Skype kicks the bucket on May 5

Eejits

There was a time when everybody had a Skype address. It was the first, last and only choice for most people to call others via their computers. It was just a form of VoIP but incompatible with the relevant IETF standards, so you could only call a Skype user using Skype. I think that's why everyone had a Skype address, and so that was it's true value: it's ubiquitous address book. Then Microsoft bought it. Then they pushed Teams. Then Skype's user-base withered. What an expensive waste. Should have made it compatible with SIP et al.

Trump administration threatens tariffs for any nation that dares to tax Big Tech

Least favoured partner

Would it be so terrible if the world tore up all treaties with the USA and treated them as undesirable? Do they really have anything anybody else wants?

Chips come from Nederland and Taiwan. Manufacturing is China, India and Malaysia. Support services are Philippines, India and Thailand.

Without all of those, especially chips, could they build or launch rockets, train ai, build cars, ...

Let them tariff away, the rest of the world can reciprocate and when the dust has settled, China will have won.

They're a crazy, stupid people who prefer a narcissist, blowhard, lying, deceitful, bullying cont who flouts all law and convention for their president rather then anybody else.

BOFH: The USB stick always comes back – until it doesn't

what's wrong with them?

Is it the USB interface you guys sneer at or the QLC NAND chips?

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Re: All you need

M365 supports shared mailboxes via IMAP if your client supports "new authentication".

Google torpedoes 'no AI for weapons' rules

what's that Skip?

Google's Don't Be Evil fell down the mine?

OpenAI cozies up to Uncle Sam with ChatGPT government edition

got every single question wrong

A colleague browbeat me into trying o1 on a web development project. Not a single one of its answers was correct, but it did give the kernel of a useful solution which, through additional reading and experimentation, resulted in a very good solution. I'm sure it would have taken me much longer to get there without o1.

The takeaway for me is that it one treats everything it says with utmost suspicion and checks it carefully, it most certainly can help an experienced practitioner arrive at good solutions. Take nothing it says at face value or you'll end up looking like a fool; which would be well deserved.

New Outlook marches onto Windows 10 for what little time it has left

Re: Windows 10/11 had a perfectly fine mail app

I'm a long-time Thunderbird user and have no problem using it with exchange, now that it supports "new authentication" out of the box.

After a long lunch, user thought a cursor meant their computer was cactus

What's the problem?

Also known as, "I don't know what's wrong but I'll know it when I see it."

Techie fluked a fix and found himself the abusive boss's best friend

Foreign language comments

I worked for a Japanese office equipment company and was debugging a word-processor when one of the Japanese managers walked by. I was reading the source code out aloud (doesn't everyone?) when he asked me where I learned Japanese. Funny how he immediately understood the purpose of a variable but I had to pour over the source code.

Microsoft investigating 365 Office activation gremlin

New outlook

New outlook doesn't display shared mailboxes for my users.

Tesla sued over alleged Autopilot fail in yet another fatal accident

They win this time

but they have to win everytime. when we win once it sets a precedent, which is hard to reverse.

NetAdmin learns that wooden chocks, unlike swipe cards, open doors when networks can't

Re: Leg day at the office

You went there for privacy during a call with a potential new employer. After ending the call there was no signal to start a new one. I think not

why did it need 15 switches

for 30 locks?

Cast a hex on ChatGPT to trick the AI into writing exploit code

Does not say exploit

It says 3xpl0it. Should have decoded the hex properly to reveal all its 1337 glory.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Other ways of attracting attention

I don't think caller ID can be withheld for SMS, and, if it can be, how could the debtor reply?

'Newport would look like Dubai' if guy could dumpster dive for lost Bitcoin drive

I'm Satoshi and so is my wife

is what he didn't say, but perhaps he's really Craig Wright and that's the drive he told the Norwegian court that he'd stomped on. Stranger things have happened.

Actually, no, they haven't.

World Wide Web Foundation closes so Tim Berners-Lee can spend more time with his protocol

Datum needs to be in a big data centre

Edge computing is a fine idea and I support it wholeheartedly. The problem with it is that bandwidth is thin at the edge, power is unreliable, environment runs hot and dusty, and the hardware lacks error correction. Not always, of course, but, say, 99.99% of it.

Social networks could be engineered to allow the data to keep appearing and disappearing, but, my god that would be hard. What they can't do is analyse and aggregate petabytes of data across thin, highly contested links.

There's a reason Google and Facebook have bigger and better networks than AT&T, CenturyLink and Verizon, and more computer power than IBM and Microsoft. It's because they can't operate any other way.

I lament that it's so.

Canon ships first nanoimprint chipmaking machine to R&D lab

Re: No touching

Defectivity is not a real word. The word you want is defects.

Red team hacker on how she 'breaks into buildings and pretends to be the bad guy'

landlord overreach

"hired by the multi-tenant building owner who was worried about the inhabitants being "a little too relaxed" about office security"

I feel as if this is not appropriate. Heart in the right place, but he was conspiring to break in to offices that weren't his, and that's not okay.

I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!

Re: Are you sure?

Yes, it does. It's very clear on what will be overwritten, identifying the storage by manufacturer, model and serial number. I always feel rightfully nervous when I'm about to overwrite a complete disk, and I appreciate CloneZilla's double confirmation.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

Replacement for Putty

Putty. There's a Linux version.

Alibaba Cloud claims K8s service meshes can require more resources than the apps they run

latency 1.7 times lower

Something 0 times lower latency has the same latency. 0.5 times lower would be half the latency. 1 times lower must be 0 latency, a cool trick indeed. 1.7 times lower latency must mean traffic arrives before it was sent, which reaches Thiotimoline-like spookiness.

80 years ago, IBM gave Harvard University one of the world's earliest computers

CSIRAC

I'm endlessly fascinated by old kit.

CSIRAC, the oldest complete first generation digital computer, is on display in Melbourne's Sciencework museum, and I'm sorry to say it's such a disappointment. I first saw the machine in the Melbourne museum, where also was displayed a filmed oral history, from his hospital bed, by one of the inventors; sorry, I forget which one and can't find the film on the Web.

The exhibit at Melbourne museum was awe inspiring. You could walk around and through it. You could see the mercury storage tubes, a magnetic drum and disk, and, well, all of it.

Alas, at the exhibit at Sciencework is very disappointing. Many of the goodies, including meet tubes, drum and disk, are hidden against a wall, and they've added some ghastly light sequence to flash lights on a control panel. No doubt that hints at what it looked like in operation, but I don't like it. It cheapens what is one of the most important, if not the most important, historical computer exhibits in the world.

None the less, it's a thrill to stand in the presence of this artifact.

Musk deflects sluggish Tesla car sales with Optimus optimism

Re: Energy generation?

Not like BYD, who were a battery company before they started making cars.

Dangerous sandwiches delayed hardware installation

Re: Try to keep it culturaly correct please

Government buildings have well serviced euphemisms.

Craig Wright admits he isn't the inventor of Bitcoin after High Court judgment in UK

Why was he sacked?

and why didn't he live the comfortable life he could have enjoyed on his golden handshake?

Founder of Indian ride-share biz Ola calls for 70-hour work week

It's fair

70 hour weeks should be common, as should $300,000 starting salaries.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

well...

Witless wonder wields welder when warning watsit working.

Microsoft hits snooze again on security certificate renewal

Thumbs up

I totally support SSL-related M$ software borkage. Their software is awful at the best of times, so it saves angst when it fails on startup. #FOSSforever

NASA tests the ups and downs of air taxi comfort with VR

Are flying cars a good idea?

I'm concerned about hordes of them pulling over to the side of the sky while they wait for a repair truck; long queues, waiting for lights to change in the skyways; sky rage; and particularly, the energy required to lift a couple of tonnes of vehicle into the sky, only to throw it away on the downward trip.

Lenovo brings virtualization, cloud stack to Chinese chip designer Loongson's CPU arch

What virtualised workloads need

In my experience, IOPS is more important than MHz. The relatively slow clock speed is okay, but I wonder if Chinese servers built using Loongson will have fast I/O.

Polyfill.io owner punches back at 'malicious defamation' amid domain shutdown

io or polyfill?

With io domain being bought by funnull, and shenanigans about where they are based, is it polyfill.io who's doing something nefarious or funnull? Certainly if the io domain is running amok, polyfill.io might be blameless.

Also, at 0136 UTC, polyfill.com does not resolve. The article implies it should.

Since joining NATO, Sweden claims Russia has been borking Nordic satellites

World war

It's depressing, but I've come to accept that we're in the first stage of war. Adversaries of freedom are attacking their neighbours, the leaders of freedom are trying to appease but are being dragged into overt action, which will escalate into full blown hostility.

Yes, I'm looking at you, Russia, but also North Korea, Palestine and Israel, and a slightly circumspect China who is eyeing Taiwan and a lot of the rest of SE Asia. Germany and USA are lurching to the right, NATO may fracture, a criminal will probably sit in the Whitehouse, and I despair at where it ends.

Nowhere good.

Microsoft bigwig says the Feds catching Chinese spies in Exchange Online is the cloud working as intended

Did they really bypass the normal authentication systems? TFA said they had the key (which they found in Microsoft's crash dump.)

French state bidding for piece of Atos, offers €700M

Re: What about things in this counrty?

Calling people amphibians and frogs has no place in civilised society. Please leave your racial prejudice at the door.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Blonde moments

Users can be really stupid, and I don't mean willfully. They can genuinely not see our understand the obvious.

I took a support call once, I don't remember what the issue was but the lady could not seem to navigate through the menus. Even 0 enter 0 enter 0 enter failed to get her to the main menu. The screen stayed the same. In desperation, I asked her to press the secret, magic debug key combination. She said it was still the same. But, when asked if the screen now displayed "Debug: H)ex edit, F)iles" and so on, she allowed that it did. In fact, that was the only thing displayed, and she had never used the magic debug key before, so, in her mind, "same as before" meant "wonder-filled and different".

I can't remember if I hung up on her or kept helping. I'd like to say it was the latter but I've got such little patience for fools that I probably did hang up on her. At least I didn't swear.

Mystery miscreant remotely bricked 600,000 SOHO routers with malicious firmware update

Rewritten firmware

I noticed a graph in the report showing 250000 increase in other when Sagemcom dropped by 600000. Seems possible to me that a large number of victims have no idea.

A thump with the pointy end of a screwdriver will fix this server! What could possibly go wrong?

I had a similar experience with a machine provided by a digital company somewhere Pacific. They provided it with 20 HDDs, which I was happy with because I could increase redundancy. Unfortunately, as I discovered sex months later, when I looked closely after a disk failed, the hardware was all 10 years old. I wanted them to replace all the drives with new, but they would only replace one with a cheery offer to replace more as and if they failed. They put it another years-old drive Six months later, 5 more died on the same night. ZFS so it managed, but I told them I reserved the right to reject replacements that were too old. During the excessive time that it took them to find more, all of the rest of the drives failed. ZFS is good but it's not miraculous, so, having lost all of my data, I transferred all five of my servers to their competitors and cancelled my account. The replacement ZFS server was also not new but the SSDs they installed were.

Where do Terraform and OpenTofu go from here?

Language evolves...

... sometimes in awful ways. My current pet hate is "incentivize". I wish there was a real word, and that people were motivated to use it. Dare I dream?

Red Hat middleware takes a back seat in strategic shuffle

Big purple

Snigger