Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi 353 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2023
Creating larger and larger amounts of fake money to build up the product and market it, and to replace real money extracted by execs and shareholders, and all those trillions in "value" will suddenly disappear when one big company announces they're giving up on using AI and all the companies' shares plummet.
Asus can't replace Nvidia. Nvidia makes/designs the underlying GPU chips that graphics card makers like Asus put onto their cards, along with AMD and Intel. Nvidia is the largest maker by far, though, and if they failed graphics card prices would skyrocket and they'd be in short supply for a long time waiting for AMD and Intel to increase production (and reducing consumer choice). AMD would also suffer greatly from an AI bust, but they at least aren't totally dependent on it as Nvidia is becoming.
I call BS on the story. Came just to ask about this type of thing, and also point out that according to the story, this wasn't even an in-use location for this company. So I'm confused about that. They hadn't installed and brought up any equipment yet BECAUSE the racks couldn't take their servers. How did the entire company go down while he was drilling in a rack that had none of their active equipment? This supposed downtime happened before the deadline to complete racking the equipment. They went live BEFORE he had even finished racking and the entire company became reliant on this new equipment that hadn't even been tested in place?
The moment one of those users tries to install Microsoft Office ('97 probably), or finds some FOSS office suite pre-installed that doesn't look like MS Office so they can't find the buttons, the system will be hauled right back to the retailer. Or they try to install any other app that doesn't have a Linux version, or which requires one of the many hurdles to install it on Linux. Or they try to run the disc that came with their cheap printer (or follow the simplistic instructions and install the software from the link provided, these days). Or when their Windows-literate family member has to come help them out, but isn't at all familiar with Linux. Or when they need support and try to call Microsoft. Or if they do think to call the retailer and discover that retailer has allocated zero resources to actually having a support system in place that understands the OS they've started selling. Or when the retailer tells them that since the OS is actually free and open source, they don't provide support. (I seriously wonder how well Linux support can be provided using the standard "level 1 monkey following a script who has never actually used a computer themselves" architecture. Could any problem ever actually be solved that way?)
>> Anyone with the power and ability will move off windows for a least the near term.
For the near term? And then move back to Windows afterward in the long term? Of course The Great Migration has been predicted several times before and it never really happens in any great numbers. 99.9% of people just adjust to whatever interface changes and new requirements there are, and make whatever purchases are required, or keep using unsupported stuff until it dies. Even many of the people who have the power and ability end up giving in and continuing with Windows for various reasons, at least on secondary machines or in VMs, and some of the ones that DO migrate go to Macs.
I've never seen an ISP router/gateway that won't let you modify the LAN configuration including the subnet to use and the DNS servers to hand out. (I did run into one that simply wouldn't let me use the 10.x.x.x range.) It's usually best to disable everything in the ISP device if you want to use your own router; it's not exactly hard to turn on a "guest" Wi-Fi in whatever router you might use so there's no need to depend on the Wi-Fi in the ISP gateway. And depending on how your ISP's router works, even if you do leave the Wi-Fi enabled, the "double-NAT" issue can be hidden and doesn't cause problems. Fiber gateways generally allow you to enable a pass-through mode so your router will think it has a public IP when it's really the IP of the gateway, so both of them will work at the same time.
Per-client, yes, though not with a quick click in the browser (unless the one comment is legit about an extension to do it), but you can't do per-app settings. Having to manage the Pi-Hole to allow a single domain in a single app temporarily isn't possible, and but I can do it by just clicking twice in the browser on an extension. Javascript filtering and bypassing those blocks per-domain is just as important to me and there simply isn't any way to do that centrally other than a proxy, which would have the same limitations.
>> If you use the router’s DHCP then as far as the Pi-Hole is concerned, all DNS requests will look like they come from the router.
Configure your router to hand out the Pi-Hole IP as the DNS server when queried for DHCP info rather than the router IP. Then clients will query the Pi-Hole directly, not relay through the router. You already are configuring the router to use the Pi-Hole as its DNS server so it's just one more setting.
I want to setup Pi-Hole or use AdGuard or something else network-wide, but you can't selectively filter on an individual machine with those. You can't say I want this browser to accept ads from this domain because the site doesn't work without them. Or say for 5 minutes, turn off filtering for this browser. At best you can log into the Pi-Hole and bypass filtering for an entire machine (which seems difficult too). You can't filter JavaScript which is even worse than ads in many ways, since Pi-Hole is just DNS. If I'm going to have to run client-side stuff anyway, I just want to do it all on the machine instead. My browser extensions for filtering can sync between devices. Chrome on my phone is the only one that's a problem but AdGuard DNS is good enough for that. But now I have multiple extensions that are going to be disabled permanently soon because they are Manifest V2 or "don't follow policy" or whatever Google's excuses are. I need to find a new Javascript filter most especially, if that's even possible with V3, but even my HTML5 Autoplay filter is going to go away.
Yeah but I'm not sure how that would help with licensing in the VM. You could have a 4P host, but the guest just sees the model as a single CPU. And it could query how many physical cores that CPU has, but that's unrelated to how many v-cores have been allocated or how many cores the host actually has. The VM might have many more cores than a single CPU of that model, but only half as many as the host. Or might have only a fraction of the cores of a single CPU. I can't think how they could really control the licensing of this feature based on the core count of a VM. Seems like it would have to be solely based on the core count of the host, just like licensing of the Windows OS itself (but possibly with some way to check whether the counts match the license), and the guests just inherit the capability automatically. (And how does licensing of the OS or this update feature work with "rentable" cores as Intel wants to do?)
Quick search and I see it uses Azure Arc if you're not using an Azure edition of Windows, so that would cover the ability to check license counts. And you have to enable hot-patching in the VM management tab during creation or configuration. So it basically does all depend on using Azure for everything so it can be based on the subscription, but it sounds like VMs just do get the capability as long as the host has the capability and you enable it, rather than counting cores in VMs.
Is it based on the host server's core count only, which can't be faked, or how they would even implement this on virtual machines? How could they do a per-core charge on VMs that may have 256 virtual cores allocated on a 64 physical core host? Do guest VMs somehow inherit the ability to hot-patch if the host has it? Is the system be like OS licensing in general, on the honor system with a BSA licensing audit as the boogey monster to make you willing to pay properly, or is the code going to require "activation" where it checks your key or account to see whether you've subscribed to the right number of cores? And maybe that's how the VMs get it enabled, because they do the check and see that their host is enabled? Do you have to configure it in every VM one by one? (I haven't read up on the preview of the service.)
I also just discovered that if you accidentally clicked the upvote or downvote buttons on this site, you can't click it again to undo the vote.
My WinRE partition is 2GB in size now. It should only need to be 512MB at most for a standard English-only install (the WinRE image that gets copied to it is a whopping 128MB in size). I had it at 1GB because of some previous issues related to the size some years ago. I increased it again the first time this failure occurred, just to see if it would help. Every time they've released one of these updates, I've gotten the failure message over and over, across weeks of updates running, until it finally went away on its own. At one point they told people how to manually install the update using the patch from the Microsoft Update Catalog (which I did) but specifically mentioned that you'd STILL get the error message even though your system had the security fix involved.
The sheer fact that they've released MULTIPLE updates that do the same underlying thing (updating the WinRE image) but they also all FAIL to install for so many people, and the only "fix" they can suggest involves using command line tools to modify your partitions, and THAT doesn't always fix the problem, shows that they've got some major underlying broken code that they either can't figure out how to fix or just don't care enough to put the resources into doing it, and decided that it's okay to just pass responsibility off to their customers.
Saying it failed is still incorrect, if it's just pending a restart to finish replacing files. All their other updates that have to replace locked files just say "pending restart", after all. It's also an update to the WinRE partition, which should never be locked/in-use while the normal operating system is up. Microsoft themselves have provided instructions for completely deleting and rebuilding the WinRE partition while Windows is running. These updates just need to perform the same process using the new version of the WinRE image file, which is a relatively small file that they could download rather than "patching" the existing image.
The real issue is that this is I think the 4th time they've released an update for the WinRE partition which has failed with this exact same error code. They just cannot seem to get the process right. The only difference this time is that supposedly it does actually get installed and the error will clear, but time will tell whether that's actually true. They're not blaming it on the WinRE partition being too small, this time. The previous times, the update would not actually ever install, but the error would sometimes clear, then re-appear the next time updates ran and it tried to install again, and Microsoft would provide a complicated and potentially risky set of command line instructions for adjusting what was patently NOT the problem (the failure occurred regardless of the size of the partition for many people). Or at one point provided the manual method to install the patch then said "now you can just ignore the error that will continue to appear when updates run, even though the WinRE has been updated".
Until he declares they are and the rest of the ones in power go along with it. There's literally no way to enforce anything when the President can just tell the enforcers "don't enforce anything" because he's the one in charge of them (either through the design of the system or simply because they have decided to go along with him).
This is the most confusing article ever with no attempt at clarity. Remote Desktop app isn't Remote Desktop Connection isn't Remote Desktop Services? (Maybe make it more clear that one is only from the Store.) Windows App is for connecting to Remote Desktop and Remote Desktop Services, but it doesn't support the connection type used by Remote Desktop Connection and Remote Desktop Services?
"No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems" -- Wouldn't zero be the correct number to use? They just bother to make it changeable.
No point in commenting otherwise about Microsoft screwing up Outlook Online again. Just another day ending in Y (in English anyway) so of course there's some sort of 365 outage.
My full reply to this keeps getting deleted for no apparent reason since the site doesn't notify anyone about it, but yes, the FA applies to any speech that occurs in US territory, regardless of the citizenship of the speaker/writer. Discussions about a public figure and their fitness for office have been explicitly allowed by courts, but the speech must still be true or clear opinion, so false statements are still not protected.
Likely the only reason this is even coming up is because CloudFlare has servers in the US which cache the site's content, and other countries where such servers exist would tell the plaintiff to get bent if he tried to get the information there, including in the UK. I don't think he should be able to get the information until he's shown that the content was actually false and defamatory, or likely to be, in a UK court where it actually matters, but the Internet provides these opportunities to weasel around such things. The site ownership is registered in Saint Kitts and Nevins, so yet an entirely different country is involved if that's where the owner lives.
Yes, if the speech actually occurs in the country, but the first amendment doesn't allow you to print libelous or defamatory information. It seems to my mind that the plaintiff needs to prove the content was false and defamatory and get a UK judge to approve the subpoena to a foreign country before being able to identify the defendent in a case like this, but most law "logic" makes my head hurt, and I don't know what history there is with this case in UK court. The article doesn't even mention that he's raised it in UK court at all. Comments on a public figure relating to their fitness for office are specifically protected by the FA, after court decisions, but they still have to be factual statements OR clearly opinions.
I'm assuming the reason this subpoena can work here is because Cloudflare is based in the US and has servers in the US which cache the blog's content. I'd assume they have servers in other countries with the same content but where it would be harder to get a court to force the release of the information. The registration of the domain has most of the information redacted but shows it's registered with a Saint Kitts & Nevis address, which doesn't mean a whole lot. The site owner may live there or the UK or somewhere else, with their primary site server who knows where, and Cloudflare is just caching the data in various places, but since they have a contract with the owner and cache it in the US, they can be subpoenaed for that owner's information.
Until Windows 11, Microsoft has always been more concerned with market share as in share of PCs running Windows, not with "market" share as in how many licenses get purchased, or get purchased at normal pricing. They would have rather had Windows and Office pirated than those machines running Linux and alternative Office suites, or someone switching to Mac (though you'd have to be insane to think switching to Mac was cheaper, obviously), and other than token efforts to stop cracks being profitable for anyone, they didn't do much to stop pirating and were fine with gray market licenses. They still don't care about gray market licenses, and pirating is actually really easy now. This is the first time they've ever truly made an effort to eliminate multiple generations of machines, and according to them, it's not because of money but because of security. And I actually halfway believe them on that, because of the history of not caring about ensuring new purchases. They know they'll get a huge number of new purchases anyway, at some point, because of businesses and users that don't know much and just buy a new machine whenever anything goes wrong. They don't greatly care about the remainder, which is why the code still allows workarounds to install without supported hardware, so they still manage to retain those few users on Windows rather than losing them to Linux, and get them off of Windows 10, and the majority of users will be on supported hardware which has the security capabilities they want to push (which happen to also help tie you to the Microsoft semi-walled garden).
Shouldn't say that Windows 11 "won't run" on serviceable hardware. It has arbitrary limitations requiring newer hardware that have nothing to do with performance capability. It will in fact run well enough on decade-old hardware. The days when you needed 4 times the "minimum" RAM and CPU requirements to actually get good performance are past (the OS itself runs tolerably even below the minimum that are required to permit installation), and disk space is cheap now.
Well, not really solved, but it will get ended, forcibly and unilaterally now that there's an entirely conservative/MAGA-controlled government bought and paid for by Big Tech and other rapacious industries that don't care about the people. Toss in some Democrats and Independents who can see that they won't get anything passed from their own agenda in the next couple of years and decide to accept any bribes that come their way and then get out by the next election, and the right will have all the votes they need to do anything they want. Then if we're allowed to have elections again, maybe Democrats get control, and they repeal whatever got passed and the cycle starts over again.
In the early 2000s, I worked for a large ISP on the US east coast. We worked out of an office in Massachusetts. One of the engineers turned off an interface on a router in Virginia which brought down half of our backbone, and for whatever reason there was no management console remote access. Luckily we had a partner or something in the area that was able to drive there and just rebooted the whole router but it was still down for a couple of hours.
There was also a time when something like that happened, and an engineer had to get on the next flight from MA to another state to reboot a router.
In another instance, we started broadcasting routes over BGP for basically the entire IPv4 address space, which our peers accepted, so traffic for the entire Internet began coming to us and dying, causing outages for multiple other providers' clients on the entire eastern half of the US. Outages that take down large numbers of websites and services are sort of commonplace these days with cloud providers that go down, but that didn't happen often back then. We took it as a badge of honor that we were able to cause that much of an interruption and even made what would now be called a meme that we printed and posted in the office. (Something like "Can your ISP bring down the entire Internet? We can.")
Not sure I believe this one. If he was logged into the router in the building he was in, why did he have to go across the street to console into the router there to restore the connection? Even if they were in a true failover configuration with a single namespace for each pair, it would be obvious which side he was on and which interface was which. If he saw an interface that was in a fault state, why would he issue a command that would take down an interface that was NOT faulted? (I.e., if Serial0/1/0 is down, why would he issue a command to shutdown Serial0/0/0?)
You can't "withdraw a service" that you aren't providing. If the client is paying the provider for provision of Internet access AND renting the device from them (where the provider pays the ISP/telco, not the client) then the provider can disable the router because they haven't been paid for the services provided. If the client owns the device, the provider would have to contact the ISP to disable service, as logging into the device for any purpose other than contracted management on behalf of the client, for the client's benefit, is illegal. In any other case, the provider is breaking the law. They can't have the ISP shut off service (again, that is not performing contracted service on behalf of the client). They can't log in and disable anything as that is denial of service and abuse of power, and extortion to boot. (Yes it's fixable without that provider, but not without significant effort and cost when the client depends on having someone else to do it and is losing money in the meantime.) You can't block someone into their driveway by parking on the public street in front of it or call a tow truck to remove their car from the public street just because they haven't paid you for the detailing you did on it.
It's usually not quite that egregious, though. I don't know what restrictions have previously resulted in it not being able to delete things, but most likely it's that the tool just reads folder sizes without checking whether the OS is going to prevent removal of things that are "in use" or somehow reserved due to a dependency. Now that it's going to be tens of gigs (eventually), rather than just several hundred MB to maybe 2 gigs, they're realizing they fucked up by not having some way to restrict the tool from displaying amounts that can't be removed. So it is a "reporting error" from that perspective, but it has always been present and has accidentally exposed the downside to Checkpoint Updates.
So they say "in the initial run". Somehow I doubt that none of the people who ran the tool and saw that didn't try just running it again and see that now it shows the space was released, or actually look at their disk usage and see the size reduced by that amount. I wonder if any of them tried a tool like Wiztree that can dig into even protected folders to show how much space is actually being used in folders like System Volume Information or the updates cache.
Microsoft may be claiming it's a "reporting error" but based on the way the new Checkpoint Updates seem to work, the previous updates WILL be retained and using up space because otherwise it would have to redownload them every time a new update is released (the way we had to download a Service Pack plus every update released after that, until the next Service Pack or Cumulative Update that included them all), meaning your updates would take longer and longer to download each time. The only way to avoid that is if they also have a consolidated package that can be downloaded instead, where they've already patched in those binary differentials, for every release, which would increase their own storage usage and effort. If they aren't going to change the Disk Cleanup tool to ignore those cached updates, or perhaps list them as a separate option to be removed with a note about the consequences, their own tools will be eliminating the benefit of Checkpoint Updates AND making updates worse for people.
Of course my Windows 10 system is showing 3.95GB of used space right now, so it's not like hoarding space for no reason is anything new. But my Win11 laptop hasn't been turned on for a couple of weeks, and with all the problem reports I'm afraid to do so unless I disable wireless long enough to disable the update service until I can perform a backup.
Apparently one Winamp is worth one-tenth of one US penny. I'm not even sure if there is such a thing as a Winamp (only this site lists it) but they apparently were trying to do NFTs at one point. Seems like an appropriate price though for one copy of the software.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/winamp/usd
I was trying to figure out what the difference is between a fork and a "modified version" and all I can think of is that they have to remove every reference to the name Winamp and then it becomes a fork. But I'm not a programmer of FOSS expert. It does seem like it doesn't matter one whit what their WCL said. They showed that they included GPL2 code so now anybody can do whatever they want with it according to the GPL2 terms (though the other code that Llama legitimately had no right to distribute is probably still off-limits).
If this did get forked/converted to FOSS, it would just end up like most other software of that nature: used by a few technologically-literate people, made ugly and hard to use in the name of giving users complete control and customizability so it can never get anywhere in mainstream use.
Perhaps the popular vote would have been more effective during all those years if the electoral college hadn't been fouling things up. Perhaps more people would have voted if they felt like their votes counted, and maybe one side or the other would have been better represented. In every instance, it was the Democrat who won the popular vote (even carrying vastly more states in 1824) but the Republican won by carrying enough states with more electors. Perhaps things in general would have been very different if even that first time in 1824 the popular vote winner had become President.
But even if it doesn't happen often, the fact that it ever happens is ridiculous. It's just bizarre that the number of people who want a candidate has no direct relation to how many votes that candidate gets, and that they can focus on certain states while basically ignoring others because those states' electoral votes are "locked in" by die-hard voters who may be a majority in that state but not in the country overall, making it literally impossible for the other party's votes to count. If an equal percentage of the registered Democrats and registered Republicans in a big state were to vote, but there were more Republicans living there, that large state's entire contribution to the election is Republican, overshadowing 2 or 3 other smaller states' votes for Democrats even if the total number of people voting Democrat would be higher.
Ranked ordering by direct popular vote is of course superior, with multiple candidates instead of two, allowing more people to get "He's not my most preferred choice but at least he's not the worst one so I'm okay with it". Even if we just eliminated the barriers to multiple parties in elections that would help immensely. But until all the old people die out who are stuck in the past and hoarding power, none of that will happen.
The world has changed quite a bit since then. Socially, technologically. So many of our institutions are rooted in "traditions" that were established long ago under different circumstances that forced the behavior or just couldn't be fought against, usually because men would just kill anybody that disagreed, and when there were periods of change, it was just very difficult and easier to go back to the old ways. Changing and sticking with it would in many cases be much easier now, when we can communicate across the world with milliseconds of delay, and physically cross the planet in hours. Only human resistance to change, especially resistance from the powerful when those changes would take away that power, stops those things from happening. If we can avoid extending the lives even further of people who accumulated wealth and power and are mired in the old ways and holding us back, maybe the world will improve. Even having King William would probably make a dramatic change despite the lack of true power.
There is no need to explicitly say those words. He is a presidential candidate, so his behavior is held to different legal standards. He was making a campaign stop and handed cash to someone. That is an attempt to buy their vote. Just walking down a street and giving some cash to a panhandler would be okay, until he says "Hi I'm Donald Trump" or has people around him with campaign signs. Again, there are different standards for people in different situations.
And yeah, a lot of the bullshit that the right is pulling to prevent people from voting, like keeping them hydrated while they wait in long lines, are, well, bullshit. Every law that gets pushed through is a blatant attempt to make it harder for people to vote who are more likely to not vote Republican, not to protect the voting process. Handing out water to people standing in the sun for hours is simply being a good person, it's legal to campaign more than 150 away from the polling places, and they handed out water and food regardless of party affiliation or who people were going to vote for so they weren't buying votes. The fact that most Republican organizations are not made up of the type to be humane and generous to others doesn't mean that no one should be allowed to, except in the minds of Republicans who know that the people who would be most affected would probably vote Democrat so it would be good to make them abandon the line.
That is the most non-sensical reasoning. What you did in the primary has nothing to do with who you vote for in the general. Yes, in some states if you register Democrat you can only vote in the Democratic primary and not the Republican, but you can still vote for Republicans in the general election. Primaries just narrow down who will be the party candidate in the general election and then we choose between the two (or sometimes 3, and legally it could be more, but it's always at least those 2). The fact that you chose to register Democrat and vote in the Democratic primary has nothing to do with voting straight Democrat other than you CHOSE to vote straight Democrat automatically rather than considering each candidate's position and picking the candidate that is best instead of based on party.
And why would you "change back"? You want to vote Republican, but you registered as a Democrat and now feel you're forced to vote straight Democrat by primary laws that are not applicable to the general election? The laws have nothing to do with what you're doing here. You're either very confused or very lazy so you've never made even a cursory review of how this works. Or you're just brainwashed and accepted whatever someone told you without checking for yourself. The laws that prevent you from voting in either primary aren't a horrible thing. Political parties in this country are a weird protected entity and some states just give them the power to exclude voters who might be trying to "spoil" the primary election by voting for a "bad" candidate that they think will lose in the general election. The rules are valid, you're just interpreting them incorrectly.
I seriously doubt that it's illegal, in an exacting examination of the wording of the law, to pay someone to simply make a statement that they will vote with no enforcement behind it, versus doing something to ensure that they vote. I don't think the DOJ calls up and warns you that you broke the law but it'll be fine if you stop now (not regular people anyway). However other people may have given them the impression that they were going to push the issue which could have caused enough problems that CAH couldn't deal with it. Perhaps they'll bring it back once they get more assurance that it's okay.
Yeah that's true. They started it out with the "Delivery Optimization" for Windows Updates, which would connect to other people's PCs on the Internet to get updates through P2P tech, which was so bizarre, brazen and unethical that they backed down and made it only use machines on your local network by default, where it makes sense.
