Posts by bob, mon!

I've gone from writing about SD-WAN to depending on it

Two WAN links for $125 ???

I'm quite surprised that the author can get both T-Mobile and Starlink for $125 / month. Twice that much I could believe....

5G service is not widely available in rural northeastern Pennsylvania (1700 miles from Denver, slightly less than London-to-Istanbul), and our DSL never ever reached 1Mbps, so we jumped on Starlink while it was still in beta. That service "grandfathered" into their current "Residential Max" plan (up to 400Mbps) at $130/month. They offer lower-bandwidth services for $55 or $85 monthly, but they would be marginal for a household with two working professionals.

T-Mobile does offer a "Home Internet Backup" plan for $30 (or maybe $20) per month, but around here it would be 4G at best, with bandwidth in the low 10's of Mbps.

Scalding hot AI accelerators have put datacenters in hot water. Two-phase cooling could chill them out

Re: "the less heat you need to push out to the atmosphere"

Absolutely agree. Unless the dry cooler can radiate at wavelengths which the atmosphere doesn't absorb, it still ends up in the atmosphere. This is a major benefit of in-orbit data centers, they're not in the earthly environment so their waste heat can go somewhere else (heat up the CMB, anyone?).

Still, lowering the water consumption rate is beneficial --- there's a local initiative to build a data center a kilomete or so from my house, and my water well, and I'm not happy about it.

The article doesn't mention the coolers' operating efficiency --- you need some energy (and attendant waste heat generation) to move the coolant around. I would like to think this two-phase system is more efficient in this regard as well.

Thermodynamics is a bitch.

AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region

Nice writing style

I switched to this article immediately after reading a recent column by journalist Dave Barry. The continuity of style was remarkable.

Arguable relevance to anything at all: in his current column Dave describes going ONLINE to consult a witch. As it happens, he was consulting a UK-based witch about a US college basketball game, so the purchased spell was unsuccessful. But it was all ONLINE.

"No disaster recovery runbook in the world has a section titled "Regional Armed Conflict."

I once worked at a large organization that stored data backups in a salt mine. One of the stated reasons is that (disused) salt mines are resistant to strategic nuclear devices. (I don't know if they ever wrote that into a document, but I wouldn't be surprised.) So mayb "Regional Armed Conflict" can be subsumed under "Global Armed Conflict", which will be next month.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Re: ternary?

From a purely theoretical point of view, the most information-dense number base would be "e" (2.78128etc.) --- but a non-integer number base presents some challenges. The integer "3", being closer to "e" than "2", is thereby closer to optimal for information density.

However, circuits that can distinguish between "nothing/0/False" and "saturation/1/True" have been and are cheap and easy. Circuits that can discriminate between "nothing", "saturation", and "midway-between" get more and more difficult as "saturation" gets closer and closer to "nothing". From an electrical point of view, if you can build a device with half a volt of imprecision, and try for 0V and 5V levels, a device that runs at 0.5V and 4.5V is good enough to sell; and it and can be scaled down to perhaps 1.1V total range while still discriminating between 0 and 1. But if you need three values and your circuit is imprecise to half a volt, then you can't go lower than 2V at the absolute minimum.

Over the years the precision of the devices has improved substantially. But rather than re-express everything in ternary logic, designers made the devices smaller/faster/more numerous.

Researchers poison stolen data to make AI systems return wrong results

Re: "I don't see how this actually protects against IP theft"

"If the user base of an LLM - the buyers of the stolen goods - know that the output can't be relied on, then in theory they'll stop using it. "

Really? And how will the buyers know that they shouldn't rely on it? Most people accept computer output as authoritative --- "Garbage In, Gospel Out" was true 40 years ago. Being able to get a response from a "natural language" prompt only adds a veneer of credibility.

The most durable tech is boring, old, and everywhere

Re: "ATM networks"

Ethernet.

A lot of WiFi routers still use it for their uplinks. And it's still fighting for a place in the approaching Tbps backside-connection space.

Going deeper: CMOS.

And more abstractly: Regular expressions. The command line! ASCII, at least as part of Unicode.

NIST contemplated pulling the pin on NTP servers after blackout caused atomic clock drift

"Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?" - The Chicago Transit Authority

Subsequently known as "CTA", before settling on "Chicago".

Cornish recycling drive sows confusion among Reg Standards Bureau

pasty vs. pastie, pastie vs. pasty?

Because "nipple cover" and "meat-filled pie" are just too darned unambiguous?

Although I could manage something salacious with "meat-flled pie" if I try hard enough. And from a biological point of view nipples are involved in nutrition....

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Vibration & banging ?

My Jeep Cherokee had factory-installed CD player. If they'd ever heard the phrase "shock-proofed" it might've worked much better than it did.

I want a picture of where the tower PC was installed --- back seat somewhere? Surely not in the trunk!

Many employees are using AI to create 'workslop,' Stanford study says

Irrelevant language grumble

"...a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society that will become wholly dependent [sic] upon outside forces"

So, what is "[sic]" about this? Was it written by an AI?

MX Linux 25 loses systemd toggling power as Debian 13 looms

A regrettable KDE choice

I am a long-time KDE user, and i almost always have at least one konsole window running with multiple tabs. This layout can persist from one login to another when KDE is running on X. However, when I tried to switch to Wayland I found that something about it didn't support this feature. Konsole is actually a major part of my workflow so this inability made Wayland a non-starter for me at the time. If that's still true, and MX Linux will now only support KDE on Wayland, then my interest in it goes way down.

Can MX be installed with X (and maybe Xfce), and then add KDE/Plasma afterwards? That should work but it's a shame to have to find a work-around for a choice the developers have made.

(If I'm worng or out of date about konsole and Wayland I'd love to know that.)

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: Nothing is ever new

"22L" would be a runway oriented at 220 degrees (where North is 0 degrees), and it's the left-hand one of a pair pointed that way. Similarly, "10L" would be the left-hand runway oriented to 100 degrees, and "7R" the right-hand one oriented at 70 degrees.

I *think* I recall a publicized event involving runway 22L at Boston's Logan International Airport, back in the 1970's. (Or maybe that's must my brain continuing to degrade.)

Anaconda puts the squeeze on data scientists now deemed to be terms-of-service violators

Impact on education?

I've been urging my Python students to get and install Anaconda as an easy way to get the language, a nice editor (spyder), and many modules in one convenient package. It sounds like we're still okay for now, but I can't help wondering how long that will last.

These are newbies and non-programmers, so I'm not interested in making them download things piecemeal --- for some, this is the first time they've ever installed non-Microsoft things (or maybe anything) on their laptops.

<rant>

Microsoft, Redhat/IBM, Oracle, now Anaconda... they're all trying to push us back to the heady days of the 1960's when computer installations were all closed shops. My school is already a minor supplicant of Microsoft. Was Crowdstrike a wake-up call? HAH!

</rant>

RIP Bram Moolenaar: Coding world mourns Vim creator

Farewell, Bram Moolenaar. You are missed and remembered.

Inevitable, but very saddening. I met Bram once at some Linux expo or other; he was just a nice, quiet, unassuming man. He will be missed.

(I've been a dedicated vi user since I switched from ed. I love vim (gvim), it's the first thing I upgrade on new OS installs. Three gvim windows open on this machine at the moment.)

AMD says transistor tech will keep Moore’s law alive for 6 to 8 years

Ironic quote in the sub-headline

...considering that Moore's original observation referred to lowering the cost of transistors. Here's a quote from his 1965 paper (see e.g. https://montcs.bloomu.edu/~bobmon/PDFs/Gordon%20Moore.Law.pdf)

The complexity for minimum component costs has in-

creased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see

graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate

can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the

longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, al-

though there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly

constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the num-

ber of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost

will be 65,000.

I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single

wafer.

After lunar orbit trip NASA's Orion capsule is on its way back home

unbelieveable accuracy

"Orion carries a trusty bit of equipment leftover from NASA's Space Shuttle era, its main engine, capable of providing 6,000 pounds (over 2,721 kilograms) of thrust "

Other sources suggest that the Space Shuttle's main engine provided as much as 470,000 pounds of thrust. One document does mention the "Orbital Maneuvering System Engines" producing 6,000 pounds of thrust.

Chill out to the sounds of an expert typing on a variety of mechanical keyboards

Northgate keyboard

I still have a Northgate Omnikey from three decades ago. Great keyboard, even without the Windows key :-] Sadly, I can't get it to work through my KVM switch.

Weighs a ton, should be able to stop a small-calibre round at least.

Bullseye! Debian-based Raspberry Pi OS scores an update with 'less closed-source proprietary code'

Re: Back to the Past

> Or try the unofficial Debian arm64 edition.

I'm sticking with 64-bit RaspiOS beta for now. I have to maintain both RPi3 and RPi4 with their differing boot methods, so bringing the Debian release up looks daunting. Or maybe I'm lazy.

Check your bits: What to do when Unix decides to make a hash of your bill printouts

A compromising document

"...an office automation suite compromising the usual suspects: word processing, spreadsheets, email, database and so on."

Is this the office automation suite for scandal mongers? Or just a lot of apps that are vulnerable to zero-days?

I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key

Re: Just being pedantic...

Well, I would drive 500 miles,

and I would drive 500 more,

to be the bloke that drove 1000 miles to crash into your door....

.

.

.

It just doesn't work with kilometers, does it?

Microsoft doles out Office Long Term Servicing Channel for cloud refuseniks

Who needs it?

Office XP works as well as it ever did, and does a good 90% of what 90% of the users actually want out of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation app. And Outlook on the Web does the rest.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

Re: Oy!

Oddly enough, south Florida isn't the part that supports him.

I think the Florida Orange Growers' Association does --- he's their office spokesmonster.

Staff and students at Victoria University of Wellington learn the most important lesson of all: Keep your files backed up

Bad move for an IT department

Sounds to me like they just failed their midterm practical exam.

The good optics of silicon photonics: Light sailing serenely down a fibre

100Gbps !!!

Oh boy! Multi-Gbps fiber to the desktop! Connected to my multi-Kbps DSL to the house!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE snore.

Physicists wrap neutrino detector in cosy blanket to shed light on the Sun's secondary fusion cycle

Re: Astrophysicists love approximations

Way back when I was in college, I was told that an engineering equation was "good enough" if it was accurate to 3 decimal places; a physics equation was good enough if it was within an order of magnitude; and an astrophysics equation was good enough if the units came out correctly.

That was in the days when slide rules ruled....

Retired engineer confesses to role in sliding Microsoft Bob onto millions of XP install CDs

Much work to generate a blob...

If a million code monkeys beaver away on a million keyboards, for a million years,...

could they produce an encrypted version of Microsoft Bob?

-bob,mon (why yes, I DO take this all personally)

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!

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.