Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi

Dave's not here, man. But this mind-blowingly huge server just, like, arrived

Re: After booting for the second time

Sure they weren't just not cleaning the litter boxes?

Re: After booting for the second time

Which smells like skunk spray, and skunk weed is particularly strong-smelling. It wouldn't have been called skunk weed if it didn't smell like skunk. If weed smelled like roses, strong-smelling weed would be called rose weed. Other strains don't smell as strongly (though I have limited experience, only smelling what my sister and brother use and whatever I happen to smell around town), so you can't really even say "weed smells like XYZ" if there's weed that doesn't smell like XYZ, and skunk weed distinctly smells like skunk while other strains don't so it's a descriptive identifying name. Trying to make it really clear by repeating so it gets through your weed fog.

Re: After booting for the second time

I used to wonder why there were so many skunks spraying all the time in the area around my old apartment. It took me years to figure out that "skunk weed" was a literal description of the smell of that strain. It's awful when you're going through a restaurant drive-thru and get that wafting through your car (even with the windows closed, A/C blowing and set to recycle the cabin air) and then it lingers despite no visible smoke ever having entered.

Microsoft might have just pulled support for very old PCs in Windows 11 24H2

Which also means selling new Windows licenses, and that's really what it comes down to. Hardware vendors were never paying Microsoft to encourage hardware sales, but Microsoft would do anything, legal or not, to get another Windows license sold.

Re: So thats it for upgrades

We'll probably still see Windows 7 Embedded running those things in 20 years. I think it probably has even longer functional life than XP.

Android doesn't support PCs period, and the expectations for mobile devices are different from PCs. And Apple is an entirely irrelevant comparison due to it being a closed ecosystem where you have limited choice of hardware and OS, and they can arbitrarily cut off support anytime they like with no promise of backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is an expectation in the Windows world. The only difference between a 32-bit processor and a 64-bit processor that is inherent is how much memory they can address. It has nothing to do with processing power or multi-tasking capability (other than needing more memory for the bloated applications and OSes). When comparing 32-bit and 64-bit versions of OSes and applications which are capable of running within the sub-4GB limits, there is no performance difference. All of the architecture improvements and performance increases could have been done with 32-bit-only processors, if RAM limits weren't a factor. Virtually everything moved to 64-bit as a practical requirement several years ago, with 32-bit just there for the edge cases, and many others made 64-bit a hard requirement in that time. Microsoft made the change because there was no longer enough need for 32-bit among customers.

Re: October 14, 2025 - Bring it on!!!

So you can have a problem with them not supporting things as far back as 7th-Gen, but other people can't have a problem with not supporting 6th-Gen, 5th-Gen, or older? Other people can't have a problem with them completely disabling installation on older hardware? All that matters is what affects you?

If it's 7 years old, it's not able to simply install Windows 11 and expect that it will be supported and that updates/upgrades will continue to work. Having POPCNT isn't the only issue. You can only install on a 7-year-old CPU by using unsupported workarounds, that may stop working at any time, and which may disable updates at any time.

Plenty of people do still want to upgrade their OS without replacing perfectly capable older hardware that can run the newer OS if there weren't arbitrary requirements for non-essential features. Plenty of people have older hardware that they can't afford to upgrade until they absolutely have to, but still would like to have a current and supported OS that gets security updates. Plenty of people can't afford to get a new system with a processor that is less than 4-years-old (the requirement at the time of Windows 11's release; now 6.5 years). Microsoft didn't need to disable installation on older hardware to begin with, they could have just made it "unsupported" but still functional since there was nothing in the actual code that prevented older CPUs from working for the actual OS, and if something didn't work, too bad. That would make this new change more palatable, to me; even more so if we really knew what the POPCNT instruction was being used for and whether it was actually necessary and useful. My guess is it's related to all the unnecessary graphical features and acceleration.

I just noticed that the release dates for both Windows 11 and the first 8th-Gen Intel processors was October 5. They chose to support EXACTLY 6-year-old hardware on release.

You contradict yourself. Backward compatibility mostly just means not adding instructions that aren't available on older hardware (or that have known bugs or performance issues on older hardware), but you complain that they added arbitrary and unnecessary instruction requirements that eliminate older hardware support.

Re: Linux's moment

Android and ChromeOS are operating systems with Linux underpinnings, but they are not Linux distributions, in similar way to how MacOS is an OS with FreeBSD underpinnings. If you dig really deep, you can get *some* of the functionality of Linux or FreeBSD, but the OS as a whole is not intended to be used in that way and even Android/ChromeOS/MacOS don't function like they're based on Linux or FreeBSD on the whole. You can't make any of them act like an arbitrary Linux/FreeBSD distribution.

Re: Linux's moment

99.999% of the world was not rearranging the locations of menu items in the applications they bought/rented/downloaded.

Re: Linux's moment

But there aren't 47 different UIs for Windows that are current and all popular in their own little worlds.

Cutting-edge robot space surgeon makes first incision in Zero-G

Re: has even performed colorectal surgery on a human patient using the device

Honest, Doc, I just fell on that robotic arm control joystick and it snapped right off!

If I had anything to do with it, the first time an actual human operation in space was scheduled (not life-threatening emergency of course) I would rig the video feed with an "AI" to create a fake patient and the other astronauts around them, with everything responding to the surgeon's input, and when they made the first incision it would be like the Alien chestburster scene. Blood spraying everywhere in zero-G, people screaming. Maybe the xenomorph rips open one of the station walls.

Apple Vision Pro units returned as folks just can't see themselves using it

Re: Re:

You think they wouldn't?

Those devices all have to be registered to valid Apple ID accounts, and I imagine a large percentage of them use those email addresses online, and I can certainly imagine a company like Apple actually going through the effort of tracking that kind of thing down when it's a low-hanging fruit (HA!) that they can delegate to automated systems. "Your refund will be processed within 7 to 10 business days while we investigate."

I'm surprised the terms don't include conditions that void the "no questions asked" return policy if you make public that you will be returning the product or disparage it or make negative public comments about it in any way, making it only returnable for exchange in the event of a defect.

Air Canada must pay damages after chatbot lies to grieving passenger about discount

Re: wOW

I'm sure they made that money back by laying off a pilot for a week.

Well, guess you should request that all your relatives die on a schedule that is convenient for you to be able to book the cheapest flights on short notice or that their funeral be held off until you can get a copy of the death certificate to send to Air Canada in time to wait for approval of your discounted fare.

Do they think allowing a retroactive discount is going to result in large numbers of people bumping off a relative so they can book expensive vacation flights on short notice? Or using their vacation time to dig through the obituaries to find people that died a few days before to pretend to be relatives? Is everybody going to have 6 dead grandmothers each year?

Worried about the impending demise of Windows 10? Google wants you to give ChromeOS Flex a try

Re: Chrome appears to be more or less Andriod

It's not just about updates that add needless features and bloat, but security. The majority of users are not running locked-down networks and locked-down PCs, or costly anti-malware and firewalls (or free anti-malware that bogs a system down more than Microsoft does) and don't have IT staff, and the majority of businesses are small businesses that don't have those huge resources, so having an OS that doesn't even get security updates (unless Microsoft deems a particular vulnerability so bad that they patch an old OS) is a bad thing.

Re: Gluts can be good

Corporations rarely bother to resell their old equipment. Really big ones might pass them to a refurbisher but likely aren't paying their people to eBay anything directly, but there are vastly larger numbers of small and medium businesses that have 1 to 25 PCs that don't have the resources to bother with trying to offload stuff like that AND won't bother with eBay just to get a few dollars, who run the machines until they physically die or are not worth being used by anyone, and it just goes in the bin or to a recycler which isn't allowed to resell them and usually strips the parts or sends stuff through an industrial shredder to get precious metals out of it. And if they do get resold, they usually want to include a refurbisher's Windows license, which means Windows 11 after next year, which means it probably can't be resold because it won't run Windows 11. Even if there are millions that get resold for Linux use, there are still millions more getting trashed.

The arbitrary cut-off to only allow Windows 11 on machines less than 7 years old without dodgy workarounds that may suddenly stop working, and less than 15 years old even with workarounds after 24H2 is released, combined with the cutoff of all Windows 10 support, means there will be millions of systems that are suddenly nothing but junk in the eyes of the majority of the developed world. Just look on sites like Amazon at how many refurbished systems are available with Windows 10 pre-installed using pre-8th Gen Intel processors, which will suddenly be virtually worthless because the OS is completely unsupported and the resellers aren't going to spend time trying to get them set up with Linux. Even if they just tried to sell them off as blank Linux boxes, there just aren't that many Linux USERS to buy them.

Re: ChromeOS *is* Linux

It's not considered a Linux distribution because while it is based on the Linux kernel, it's a closed system, not intended for the user to be able to modify the OS themselves, install arbitrary apps running directly on the kernel, etc. and it all depends on OS updates provided by Google. It may be possible to hack some of that in, but then you're no longer running ChromeOS itself.

HP CEO pay for 2023 = 270,315 printer cartridges

About 5 ink (not toner) cartridges per HP employee, roughly the number needed annually if you print 5 pages every other month due to it drying out. Or 3 HP printers annually if you're unlucky enough for the cartridge to also gum up the printheads so that the whole thing has to be tossed.

250 million-plus reserved IPv4 addresses could be released – but the internet isn’t built to use them

Re: Future use??

You'd be surprised by how much of the RFC1918 address space does get advertised for routing over ISP networks, which is a potential vulnerability if someone tries to connect to it and ends up reaching a malicious server. Most devices SHOULDN'T be handling packets for those blocks outside their WAN generally, and never advertising routes via routing protocols, but there's technically nothing that says you can't use a router internally at multiple points where such routing would be valid so outright preventing it wouldn't be good and it comes down to either bad configurations or malicious configurations. But 240/4 being reserved as a "never use this" block makes it a bigger deal to prevent anything on the public Internet ever accepting routes or sending traffic for it. Kind of an arbitrary dividing line between degrees of risk, I guess. But after we reached the point of not having anymore IPv4 addresses, and deciding that IPv6 was the future, 240/4 should have been released as there was clearly never going to be any other "future use" or experiments. (And what did they need 168 million addresses for when experimenting?)

And if they had just done it in 2008, before it had become so critical, virtually every device in current use would be able to handle it by now. If they had come up with some "new or experimental use" according to the original purposes of the block being reserved, the same thing would have had to happen anyway.

Leaked memo: Microsoft employees should be using Copilot too

What if I were an MS developer and honestly knew that I could produce better code (or whatever) than AI, even if I might not be able to churn it out as fast (because I'm a perfectionist and will make sure that code is good, but will have to spend more time to do that)? Are they going to force me to use AI in order to get more product out the door in less time despite it being lower quality or having more flaws? (I know the answer, of course. Plus, a developer like that probably wouldn't have lasted long as Microsoft anyway.)

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

That's going on my list of dumbest things I've ever read.

Works okay on airplane engines.

To all aircraft and spacecraft manufacturers: I'd like to introduce you to this product called Loctite.

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

Re: Deliberation

It sounds like in your utopian world everything is government-owned and government-run.

Return-to-office mandates boost company profits? Nope

Oh I agree that there are plenty of things that shouldn't be sent to off-shore call centers full of people who don't understand you, you don't understand them, in both language, accent, culture, etc. But that's rarely stopped companies from doing it if they thought it would save a dollar/pound/euro and the customers would only complain enough to reduce revenue by a penny. And there are plenty of jobs where all of that wouldn't matter, or only slightly and could be worked around. Jobs which formerly were thought of as "we need someone here in our office to do it" so the possibility of outsourcing it wasn't considered, but are now seen to be doable remotely. So the issue becomes showing that even though the local workers can do the job remotely, that they still provide sufficient value to the company to keep them on because there is still something that off-shore workers can't provide.

So the workers in India might be working at night. So?

There is something to be said for "If you can do it at home, why can't someone in India do it?" in many cases. But that often does ignore a lot of issues that make having local workers better than scripted workers in another country with a different culture that customers don't want to deal with.

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

So they bought up 132 million IP addresses but are estimated to actually have 12 million, or 9%, of those actually in use? No wonder there's a shortage of addresses. Amazon and probably others are hoarding. Even if you consider inefficiencies due to subnetting, and quadruple the number in-use but not pingable, that's an awful fucking lot of addresses that are just being held by greedy corporations for no reason. Either just trying to drive up the price so they can sell them off in a trickle, or planning this rental cost the whole time using "shortage" as an excuse, or just trying to artificially push the world into using IPv6 by manufacturing a need.

Windows 10 users report app gremlins after Microsoft update

Re: We really need another option.

We could start executing anyone suspected of exploiting the flaws. I bet it would stop very quickly.

Breaking News: After February Patch Tuesday, no users report a loss of printing capability, and there are no reports of default browsers being reset to Edge. We are still making inquiries to be absolutely sure as it's so unbelievable, but we have also seen no complaints about blue screens and boot loops.

That's ridiculously extreme.

Re: Error in article

Well, in this case, "regression" just means "works on anything that is already installed".

I still can't even get updates to install properly weeks after the patch issue causing the 0x80070643 error on Windows Update, which ALSO prevents anything from the Store from installing or updating. The stupid thing is that the error occurred for me because my recovery partition really was broken, I fixed the partition, updates worked, then a few days later the error started again.

Netgear hauls Huawei to court over Wi-Fi patent spat

Ah that is at least a plausible interpretation, though confusing for anybody that just looks at the names and hasn't read the entirety of the legal structure of how these things are done. And I have no issue with them getting paid for their R&D (unless of course they did something shady to end up getting a patent on things that were in fact already done or obvious), but it should be standardized as part of the inclusion in the standard instead of being closed-door negotiations on a company-by-company basis, with anyone who wants to use the standard permitted to do so if they pay the established fee with no right of refusal by the patent-holder.

> require companies involved in the standards process to disclose whether they will license on RAND terms any of their SEPs included in the standard

I don't think "disclose" is the right word. That implies they have a choice and are just required to let the IEEE know whether they will or not. If IEEE won't include the standard without the company agreeing to RAND terms, then the wording is "require" them to agree to license on RAND terms.

I also don't understand why there isn't a system set up where the terms are determined and made available before the patented technology is included in the standard. That's the only way to guarantee the licensing is reasonable and non-discriminatory - it's set up in advance, everyone is aware of the terms and it's accepted by the IEEE and its members, and there can be no difference in the terms from one company to another (flat fees, sliding scale based on volume, whatever). Any fees should then have to be processed through a body set up for the purpose under the IEEE or something, paid for by IEEE member fees and/or part of the licensing fees, so that there is a clear trail showing that everything is being paid as agreed.

Or just don't include patented technologies in standards that will require fees at all. If IEEE has the option of declining to include the technology if the owner doesn't agree to RAND terms, then it's clearly not "essential".

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon is pounced upon by fast-acting admins

And this is why I won't trust Mastodon, running on any number of servers run by who knows what kind of monkeys (with no accountability) who may or may not fix problems like this and introduce vulnerabilities that could affect me even if I'm not on their server. (There are other reasons I have no interest in it, though.)

US starts 'emergency' checks on cryptocurrency power use, citing winter power demands

Maybe we should just spend the money going into this investigation on just fixing the power grid so it can handle the demands of today and the future, and making it more "green" so that it's not a big deal if someone wants to use and pay for more power. Just assume we need massive upgrades based on the trends of total power usage increase, peaks, etc. It shouldn't matter what specifically the power is being used on unless they're looking to start regulating and banning particular activities in order to reduce the load because the power companies would rather hold onto more profit than spend it to fix the problems.

Also I can't possibly believe that a single Bitcoin TRANSACTION by itself uses so much power it takes an entire swimming pool to cool the equipment that handled it, unless you're counting the fact that the equipment was already running and generating heat anyway and not splitting up that heat output with all the other things the equipment had been doing or just the idle power draw, and including every piece of equipment along the entire chain between endpoints and servers and network equipment. Perhaps MINING a coin could use that much power, attributing all the power used by the equipment solely to that coin (and since the equipment wouldn't even be turned on otherwise, that seems valid).

Dell kills sweetheart distribution deal with Broadcom's VMware

Like I said, the systems I could find for ordering were limited to configurations that would qualify for a free license, so that may fall under permitted pre-installation (though they still have to have permission to distribute it, so they must have some sort of agreement still in place; I don't think I could start assembling computers and include ESXi pre-installed even if it will be used with a free license). But I'd bet that they aren't allowed to distribute it pre-installed on any system that doesn't qualify for a free license, since now they can't SELL a license. Of course I assume the software won't work if you try to start it on bigger hardware and don't enter license information.

It doesn't entirely explain why you can't configure a system with 3/4 CPUs and more RAM, since you can obviously choose an operating system other than ESXi which would work with those options. Normally their system would just flag the hardware that isn't permitted if one of your selections is not compatible, but removing the option was a quick way to prevent trying to create those combinations since this was a sudden cut-off and they need to recreate the listings to take the limits into account.

Re: OK, I'll bite

Selling third-party support for free software is not the same as becoming liable for problems with that software.

Re: OK, I'll bite

Hyper-V Server 2019 is the last version that will exist so nobody's going to pre-install that anymore, and mainstream support for it just ended recently so installing it yourself now isn't the greatest idea for production systems.

Would it be legal to include ESXi without a paid license on a system that doesn't meet the requirements for free licensing? I suppose in pretty much any normal purchase (meaning where you don't get assigned a Dell rep because it's going to be so expensive) the requirements won't be exceeded, so free licensing applies, since the only common limit is 2 CPUs. I don't have access to a reseller portal now to see what I could spec out, but Dell's available listings for servers that have 4 sockets only show systems with 2 CPUs in them, and having 3/4 CPUs installed is a customization option but can't be selected, and with only 2 CPUs you can only get 8TB of RAM which is half the limit for a free license as well. Maybe until they've hacked out new terms with VMware to allow them to include paid licensing, they won't sell systems with ESXi pre-installed that include more CPUs or RAM than is allowed with free licensing.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Had a client whose previous IT used someone else's public domain as their internal domain. That was always fun to deal with.

If .internal can never be registered as a global TLD, then no matter how many people use company.internal for their internal domain name, it will never matter to anyone else. There becomes no reason to register a domain name to use for your internal domain, and no ABILITY to register company.internal as a global domain name. Uniqueness becomes irrelevant. Any updated DNS server will never attempt to contact any other DNS server, including the root, to talk about that TLD. That's the whole point of this proposal. To finally officially define an internal TLD that can never be globally recognized, which only became an issue when ICANN opened up the ability to create anything as a gTLD as before that it could be assumed that anything not in the gTLD list never would be.

JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry

I know how to "remove" it from the code, and I can't even program. You go back to the version of the code that didn't include it, and then add in all the OTHER changes that didn't involve the AI plug-in (bug-fixes, security, unrelated features, etc.) and then debug that. Then you can create an actual plug-in that fits into the plug-in system like any other plug-in, for people that want to use AI features for whatever idiotic reason. Yes, it will take a good bit of work, but far less than trying to unbundle it I bet, and you know what, that's the cost of doing stupid things without talking to your users because you think you need to force stuff on them that isn't to their benefit.

Microsoft Edge ignores user wishes, slurps tabs from Chrome without permission

Re: The irony...

Chrome is BASED on Chromium, and Edge is BASED on Chromium, but all the shady stuff is not part of Chromium and is just added by the various browser makers, so what exactly are you trying to say? I don't see any irony.