Posts by bob, mon!

Yeah, that Zoom app you're trusting with work chatter? It lives with 'vampires feeding on the blood of human data'

I can only hope that this data slurpage applies to the free version. My school system (consisting of 14 state universities) has chosen zoom as its official standard teleconferencing software. I have zero options to change to any other platform. And even if I could, getting people to use zoom was and is an exercise in on-the-fly training, and anything else would have that problem and no official support.

Well, maybe the corporate legal team actually did due diligence and checked out the Ts &Cs. Who knows?

Uncle Sam's nuke-stockpile-simulating souped-super El Capitan set to hit TWO exa-FLOPS, take crown as world's fastest machine in 2023

Re: Uggghh

Better to simulate them, instead of setting them off for real.

Astroboffins discover Sun is surfing on 9,000-light-year gas wave that acts as Milky Way's stellar nursery

... Is it a static wave or does it undulate? ...

Quoting from the abstract:

"Remarkably, the new structure appears to be undulating and its three-dimensional structure is well described by a damped sinusoidal wave on the plane of the Milky Way, with an average period of about 2 kiloparsecs and a maximum amplitude of about 160 parsecs."

FCC proudly wastes $90m getting data-capped, pricey satellite internet to tiny percentage of US population

Re: 98%

Rural Pennsylvania. Rural (western) New York, rural Vermont, New Hampshire. Rural Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.

I'm 2 hours from New York City (at 70 mph), and 4 hours from Pittsburgh. Lots of small towns in between, but lots of farms, forests, state hunting lands and the like as well. My nearest neighbor is across the road, but the next nearest is 1/8 mile away. No cable out here, never mind fibre. Some days "IP over avian carrier" seems like a viable option.

Re: $80 per month?

"Can you do 3Mb up with a low bandwidth modem on a long phone line?"

AHHHAHAHAHA*kaffkaff* No.

I get less than 100 KB/s (so 800Kb/s) up on a good day... and Verizon DSL doesn't give me good days. I just now got a 44.1KB/s upload of a 300MB file. Yawnnn....

Of course, a true "low bandwidth modem" would be the 300-Baud unit I started out with, back in the previous millennium.

In Rust We Trust: Stob gets behind the latest language craze

Re: Let

"let z;" - z is a... let? letter? letcher? lett?

It's lettuce. Green, leafy, and silly in a program.

I use C when Assembly isn't good enough...

Seriously: do-while versus while? (Versus for???). Look at the machine code. A decent compiler generates the same code for any version, and it's the most efficient implementation the architecture can provide. Those higher level constructs are so YOU, the programmer, can remember what you meant 6 months from now.

Be still, our drinking hearts: Help Reg name whisky beast conjured by Swedish distillers and AI blendbot

Re: Valcohol (Valhalla + alcohol)....

Valhallacohol: if you can't pronounce it, you've had enough...

------------------- this should be enough ---------------------->

RIP Danny Cohen: The computer scientist who gave world endianness meets his end aged 81

"straightforward explanations" ???

That's all you can say about the paper? I met it in grad school in the 1980's, and still have my copy. It's delightful! Here's an excerpt:

"Encouraged by this success, as minor as it is, the Blefuscuians tried to pull another fast one. This time it was on the VAX, the sacred machine which all the Little-Endians worship."

Look for IEN 137 if you want to understand where big.LITTLE came from. Or here's an online copy: https://montcs.bloomu.edu/Readings/ien137.txt

Ohio state's top legal eagle just made it harder for the FBI, ICE, cops to snoop around its DMV DB for people's faces

Wow - I wouldn't have expected Ohio to stand up for privacy in opposition to surveillance. It's a fairly conservative midwestern state, overall.

The Pi who loved me: Licensed to SSL

Hey! I represent that crack!

I 'aven't any attic....

Anyone for unintended ChatRoulette? Zoom installs hidden Mac web server to allow auto-join video conferencing

On my machine Zoom doesn't start automatically, I have to go through the start menu, and enter the meeting ID number.

Which I'm quite content to do. "Convenience", what a lame excuse for insecurity.

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

It's a warning...

The 20H1 upgrade will decimate Windows 10.

Nah, yeah: New Zealand's Rocket Lab notches up another launch success

Re: Yeah, nah...

I've heard similar contradictory speech in the US - viz.,

"Yeah, that's not going to happen"

or

"No, I completely agree with you!"

The dread sound of the squeaking caster in the humming data centre

Re: Gone fishing?

I dunno --- these were CHAIN printers, with hammers for printheads - literally. In a percussion contest you would probably lose.

Good news! We may be past peak Windows 10 October 2018 Update

"...venerable..." ???

I, for one, do not and will not venerate Windows 10. Tiles are for floors, not windows - windows come in pains.

Go fourth and multi-Pi: Raspberry Pi 4 lands today with quad 1.5GHz Arm Cortex-A72 CPU cores, up to 4GB RAM...

Re: Ethernet

True GigE will be a boon for beowulf clusters running MPI or whatever over Ethernet, as the node interconnect is a bottleneck.

I just built up a 4-node RPi 3B+ cluster for class use, now i need to justify getting 4 new RPi 4's. Also glad to hear that the boards can run on 2.5A, since the cluster doesn't have any peripherals and the current generation of multiport USB P.S.'s max out at 2.5A per port.

Next step - find out whether 64-bit Devuan will run on the new board.

March 2020: When you lucky, lucky Brits will have a legal right to a minimum of... 10Mbps

Luxury!

We used to DREAM of 10 Mbps! We had to scrape along at 5.6Kbps w/ a dial-up modem, and if wee wuz ba-ad we'd be downgraded to 300 Buad! Uphill, both ways!

Feds nab top exec on allegations he hacked a competitor, stole info… about school lunches?!

Re: Catered lunches? Bah! Kids today...

"Peanut butter and jelly?!?!?!" LUXURY.

In my day we 'ad to scour the playground for poisonous toadstools, then fry them up in our own sweat an' season them w' our tears, for lunch!

And you tell that to the s'kiddies today, they won't believe you....

The Year Of Linux On The Desktop – at last! Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 brings the Linux kernel into Windows

Re: But why?

"Might want to up that a trifle. Redmond says Windows 10 1903 will need 32GB."

Finally, we see Windows for what it is:

a 32GB boot loader for Linux. Take THAT, grub!

Micron's new 9300 SSDs are bigger, faster and simpler... which is nice

Backwards?

"Latency has also been lowered in the 9300s from 92μs/21μs read/write to 86μs/11μs."

Really? Read latency is worse than write latency? I am surprised, would've expected it to be the other way around.

Mini computer flingers go after a slice of the high street retail Pi

Re: So what do we call a dead Pi?

It's exPIred.

Re: Can I buy more than one Pi Zero?

Let's see --- 5 times Pi Zero is... Zero?

Things that make you go .hm... Has a piece of the internet just sunk into the ocean? It appears so

Now waitaminnit

"... like taking a step back in time when webpages were hand-coded HTML and images were frowned upon"

That's how I maintain my website!

*That's not how you maintain your personal webpage!*

Well, I've been meaning to get around to it....

Canadians moot methods to embiggen moose monument and make Mac great again

It'll all turn out to be a big moose-take.

Just a mutual moose-understanding.

What happens when a Royal Navy warship sees a NATO task force headed straight for it? A crash course in Morse

Re: After you. No, after you!

> Meeting US Navy ships head on would be rather worrying, given the standards of seamanship exhibited by the US 7th Fleet

VERY worrying, if you think you're in the North Sea --- the 7th Fleet is deployed in the Pacific.

Raspberry Pi fans up in arms as Mathematica disappears from Raspbian downloads

Free, but compiled for ArmHF (32-bit)

Sadly, it fails on my 64-bit devuan installation.

Distro inferno: Debian's still rocking at 25

Devuan!

It's the future of 64-bit Raspberry Pi --- even if it is slower than the 32-bit Raspbian variant of Debian....

Julia 0.7 arrives but let's call it 1.0: Data science code language hits milestone on birthday

They missed one goal for their language...

It should do what I MEAN, not what I typed!!!

As for array indices, there's no such thing. They're all offsets from the array's beginning --- look at the disassembly if you don't think so.

How evil JavaScript helps attackers tag possible victims – and gives away their intent

color me stoopid....

...but why would IE object to "setTimeOut(10)" ?

A Spectre flaw solution, Cloudflare blips, a bank cyber-heist in Canada, and more in infosec land

... Like an arrow, I know, whilst fruit flies like a banana.

And butterflies like oleo.

Router admin? Bored? Let's play Battleships using BGP!

On a ten-by-ten playing field?

For added obscurity you code encode everything in BCD....

And one abbreviation for a battleship is "BB", so you'd be playing

BB in BCD over BGP.

For some reason, you lot love 'em. So here are the many ThinkPads of 2018

"the many Thinkpads of 2018" ?

Did nothing happen in the P-series? Power users who need big screens for old eyes want to know!

Ethernet sales growing, but routing's been routed by software

Can we coax you to stop? Find a new Gig?

Or are you too twisted?

Beyond code PEBCAK lies KMACYOYO, PENCIL and PAFO

Re: Pedantic

PEIFOTS - Problem Exists In Front Of Touch Screen

Liberating SSH from Logjam leftovers

2048 bits????

640 bits should be enough for anyone...

oh wait. wrong thread.

How fast is a piece of string? Boffin shoots ADSL signal down twine

ADSL slow? Shurely not!

Here in the wilds of Pennsylvania, two hours west of NYC, I'm getting well over 200 KBps on downloads - so better than 1.6Mb/s for short bursts. LUXURY. Thank you, Verizon!

Put down the eggnog, it's Patch Tuesday: Fix Windows boxes ASAP

Re: Top Xmas tip

What if it's not preventative?

Before or after, there *will* be boozing....

To fix Intel's firmware fiasco, wait for Christmas Eve or 2018

Thank you, Lenovo?

Their list of laptops includes the T440s - "not affected", and the T460s - "affected". So where does that leave my T450s??? "Sort of affected"? "Deeply moved"? "Concerned, but not really bothered"?

Fortunately, Lenovo also listed the relevant firmware numbers, and a reboot and BIOS check suggests that I have an older, unaffected version of the ME firmware. Sure wish they'd included my machine in the list though, makes me feel somewhat abandoned.

How is 55 Cancri e like a Sisters of Mercy gig? Astroboffins: It has atmosphere

Re: "It has a mass of about eight Earths and radius of about two so it's no golf ball."

Poul Anderson had a short story as well... its point being that high-gravity inhabitants would be smaller than humans, not larger as other authors at the time had imagined.

Much too long ago for me to remember the title, alas.

Intel drags Xeon Phi Knights Hill chips out back... two shots heard

x86?

Are these things really 32-bit-oriented processors? Or are they x86-64 compatible? (Or - shudder - Itanium?)

Rowhammer RAM attack adapted to hit flash storage

Re: "What was wrong with ECC in older RAM?"

In a lot of personal computers post-IBM-PC, the RAM didn't use ECC or even parity bits, because it was cheaper not to (and "it's only a personal computer").

I had a Zenith system (Z-150) with a jumper on the motherboard, that you could set if you wanted to buy and install the additional memory chips to support parity. The default was "no parity memory", though.

Four techies flummoxed for hours by flickering 'E' on monitor

Re: "an Ohio Scientific Instruments Challenger 8P"

Wow, someone else actually bought Ohio Scientific! My first personal computer was an OSI C4MP --- 6502 processor, something like 16KB of memory, and a 5.25" floppy.

Sort of an Apple II alternative, but OSI's attitude was that they built the hardware, the OS was your problem. As in, create a disk file by first loading the monitor routines from the system floppy, using it to manually allocate as many sectors on the target floppy as you expected the file to need, then load the editor from the system floppy, edit the file (typically in BASIC), swap the target floppy back in and save the file to the disk. If you got cheapthrifty and allocated too few sectors, nothing for it but to discard all your work, de-allocate the file and start over with more sectors.

Double-sided floppies? Cut a read/write notch on the other side, and put the floppy in the drive upside-down.

Old phart icon, 'cuz that was in the 1970s.

Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city. And this is a good thing, it says

Re: Who stuffed the headline then?

"Google unleashes 20m lab-created blood-thirsty freaks on a city."

I was expecting 20-meter blood-thirsty freaks!

One thought equivalent to less than a single proton in mass

Re: Confused units

Q. "How high is green?"

A. "The faster, the smarter."

2 kool 4 komputing: Teens' interest in GCSE course totally bombs

Methinks you're conflating http/https with html.

Software dev bombshell: Programmers who use spaces earn MORE than those who use tabs

Of course there's a right answer!

Mine! Spaces are the ONLY way to go!

Do you KNOW what happens when you press the TAB key on an IBM 029 card punch? Do You?? DO YOU?????????

NOTHING, if you're good! Card punches don't have TAB keys --- the 029 has an Error Reset key there, like the Good Lord Watson intended! You tryin' to put spaces in your FORTRAN source, you're living in a state of SIN! Repent! Space out!

There's a reason it's called "whitespace", not "whitetab".

Has riddle of the 1977 'Wow!' signal finally been cracked? Maybe...

Arthur C. Clarke quote

Shurely more apropos:

"...the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." - Calvin and Hobbes

Whoops! Microsoft accidentally lets out a mobile-'bricking' OS update

“Today was a great exercise in our whole team coming together to solve a singular problem.”

Yes, they have now worked out a rock-solid methodology for closing a barn door once the horse has bolted.

Fat-thumbed dev slashes Samba security

Re: Interesting...

Annoyingly, the listed patches are for Samba 4.6, 4.5, 4.4, and some 3.x versions. My just-updated Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system is using Samba 4.3.11 --- I had to go into the changelog to verify that this version is in fact the patch for CVE 2017-7494. Done on May 19, BTW.

Orbital boffins cut four years off NASA mission to shiniest object in the Solar System

An attractive idea?

So what --- did they put a big magnet on the craft, so the asteroid just naturally pulls it to itself?