Posts by Joe Gurman

Ex-Microsoft engineer resurrects PDP-11 from junkyard parts

Naked backplanes….

….make life so much easier than the cramped, heavily shielded enclosures PDP’s had in their first lives. The thought of inserting and especially removing cards without donating copious amounts of blood is almost incomprehensible to this veteran.

Come across “one?” Try PDP-11/20 (operating an instrument at a mountaintop observatory), multiple -11/34s, commanding, receiving data from, and analyzing those data from instruments on a spacecraft, an -11/40 used by another project, that borrowed me for some grunt work, and a schizophrenic -11/70 that ran IAS during the day and Unix at night. Probably others this geezer can’t recall right now.

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Ugh.

I had resisted upgrading from 7 to 8 on macOS because of AgileBits' development environment and "all cloud storage" decisions. Now I'm forced to introduce a less secure password manager as a backup for iCloud password management. Blah.

CrowdStrike blames a test software bug for that giant global mess it made

Re: It worked on my machine!

And someone at the customer sites installing the update on one (1) testbed system each before deploying to every mission-critical production system also used to be standard QA practice. Still is some places™.

You know what spreadsheets need? LLMs, says Microsoft

Farewell, Excel….

…. it was a good thirty years, but all good things must come to an end.

Don’t let the door &c.

65 years of NASA's meatball: Original logo lives on despite detractors

Past and future

"The worm is instantly recognizable and a single color but isn't associated with what many feel are the agency's glory days."

NASA is the one US federal agency that is firmly focused on the future, so a vaguely futuristic logo is probably more appropriate.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: This isn't that surprising

And Apple knows that.

There’s something odd about this report. Apple has known for years — since well before the introduction of the first Apple Silicon machines in late 2020 — that Mac users keep their machines well over three years. It’s one of the reasons they started offering AppleCare+ service plans not just for three years but indefinitely (defined as, “until we no longer stock parts except where required by law” [e.g. France]), on a monthly billing basis. Think that “service” income isn’t making up for at least some of the supposedly missed (and famously large) margin on hardware sales? Think again.

Resale

They command high resale prices, percentage-wise.

Perseverance pays off as Mars rover's SHERLOC brought back from the brink

Re: Keep IT Simple

Considering the environment, molybdenum disulfide (sold as Dry•Slide in the US) might be a better choice.

Re: Needs a bigger ...

....or at least a rubber mallet.

Recycling old copper wires could be worth billions for telcos

In the US, Verizon has been doing this for at least 12 years

Starting no later than the recovery from Hurricane Sandy, when the ripped out miles of copper POTS cabling and replaced it with fiber.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

If you read reviews....

The use case/primary audience appears to be people who prefer a good tablet to a laptop. In the case of the Pro version, the differentiator (compared with the Air) appears to be the ability to add Thunderbolt/USB-4 storage.

Brit publishers beg Apple not to hurt online ad revenue

Re: Fuck off

Ever consider that Apple might be getting the money because its users have good reason to trust the Fruit Company on this?

Um....

"[I]mportant information which would otherwise have been very useful to them" — when was the last time you got that in any ad, anywhere?

Disclaimer: I am so adblockered-up on all my devices that the only time I ever see ads is when I briefly lift the protective force field to view specific _content_ (as opposed to ads) before swiftly turning the shields back on, that I haven't viewed many ads coming from the Intertubes. Please let me kn ow if I'm missing anything "important" or "very useful." Ta.

Help! My mouse climbed a wall and now it doesn't work right

Ah, intuitive hardware and interfaces

As a wise person once pointed out, all intuition is based on experience.

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

People in the UK may sneer

....at the vast majority of US drivers who have never seen a roundabout, traffic circle, or rotary (as they're called in Massachusetts, where I grew up), but I dar any UK driver to try driving (keeping to the right, mind) a Boston-area rotary with unsweaty clothes and dry pants. While state law humorously insists that vehicles entering the rotary have the right of way [*], the actual practice is even simpler than the UK hierarchy outlined by FIA, above: simply assume the vehicle you are driving in a Range Rover with heavily tinted windows and once you muscle your way into the rotary, _you_ always have right of way. Put another way, whoever gets there first has the right of way. Miraculously (or maybe not so, since human beings tend to get used to almost anything), there are very few accidents in those rotaries.

During a sojourn in France some decades ago, I learned that the driver entering from the right (pretty much anywhere, including rond-points) always has the right of way.... unless the intersection is signed otherwise — which is why nearly every rond-point through which I had to navigate every day was festooned with "Vous n'avez pas la priorité" signs confronting anyone trying to enter the rond-point. Not that it made much difference in the drivers' behavior.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Doesn't this seem like....

....Schrödinger's marriage?

Swift enters safe mode over gyro issue while NASA preps patch to shake it off

In general….

Satellites that require precise pointing usually have both gyros (mechanical or the ring laser variety) and rate wheels. The gyros provide information on rates of movement about a specific spacecraft axis, and the rate wheels can be used to null those out to maintain the pointing.

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

Really?

"pulled wool over buyers' eyes with forged veterinary certificates"

I see what you attempted to do there. As with the last line of the piece.

Fail, rather.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

For some of us, no.

"We have all that still to look forward to" in 2038.

Not all of us. I expect to have no more computer time or any other kind of problems by then.

"OK Boomer" you may well say, but sometimes it's reassuring not to have to worry about things. "Right. We can just cross that one off the list."

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Re: Fluoroacetonitrile

The PubChem list of hazards associated with the stuff is not for the faint of heart:

H225 (100%): Highly Flammable liquid and vapor [Danger Flammable liquids]

H301 (100%): Toxic if swallowed [Danger Acute toxicity, oral]

H311 (100%): Toxic in contact with skin [Danger Acute toxicity, dermal]

H315 (97.5%): Causes skin irritation [Warning Skin corrosion/irritation]

H319 (97.5%): Causes serious eye irritation [Warning Serious eye damage/eye irritation]

H331 (97.5%): Toxic if inhaled [Danger Acute toxicity, inhalation]

H335 (100%): May cause respiratory irritation [Warning Specific target organ toxicity, single exposure; Respiratory tract irritation]

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

Pretty much a classic case

....of an outfit that doesn't know how to manage its way out of a wet paper bag.

Doesn't know its employees are its one, real asset.

Doesn't know where its called-back-to-office employees are supposed to work.

Doesn't give a crap.

Sounds like Michael Dell.

For what it's worth, the best service I got out of anyone in Dell government sales when I was still working was from a woman working out of her home. The people who supposedly worked in offices, in Virginia and Texas, at least, were never at their desks and never returned calls. You'd think a commercial outfit would actually, like, want to make sales. Guess my requirements didn't add up to enough $. In the same epoch, all I needed to do to order from Apple or grey-box vendors was to go their website. Dell couldn't be arsed to organize such a thing.

Re: Wouldn't suprise me

Just so you know.... there's no such thing as redundancy pay in the US.

Angry mob trashes and sets fire to Waymo self-driving car

Re: Curious?

"You are more likely to hit someone in an American car because you can't see them, where the same person in the same position in front of a European car would be seen by the driver, and therefore the driver would be more likely to take action not to hit them."

Would you care to explain the difference(s) between "US" and "European" cars (many of which are manufactured elsewhere) that affect forward vision? I'm in the US, but have been driving ostensibly European-manufactured cars for the last 30 years, so I can't tell from personal experience.

iFixit tears Apple's Vision Pro to pieces

Worth mentioning

…. That the current price of the Vision Pro, mentioned prominently in every article I’ve read about the device, is roughly 53% of the initial price of the Apple II when it was introduced in 1977 (US$1298 = US$6525 today). No matter what other issues one might have with the device, or with Apple, that’s really rather remarkable.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

I think this is the first time....

....that I'm pretty certain I know the who and where of a Who, Me? story.

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

Standard doesn't necessarily mean reliable

Unless, of course, the design goes through several iterations at the jawbone stage, and then several generations of prototypes. Unless, of course, if you decide to keep those spaceports handy in case, say, the entire UK needs evacuating.

Logitech warns of logistical impact of Houthi attacks in Red Sea

Is this historical revision in real time?

1,200 Israelis were not kidnapped; about 300 were. 1,200 is closer to the number who were murdered, raped, and/or tortured.

I also get the impression the Houthis are upset about the more than 24,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, but maybe I’m attributing more human sympathy to the bloodthirsty religious minority who have made life so miserable for the people of Yemen for years.

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

Just to clarify

That was a lower case "m" in "mac trees" in Zuckerberg's post, so th uppercase "M" in the article is either a typo, or speculation that Macintoshes grow on trees in Kauai.

30 years and still sunbathing: SOHO probe continues work as a space weatherman

30 years? Perhaps it's not base 10?

SOHO was launched on 2nd December, 1995, which makes the spacecraft's operational lifetime just over 28 years.

NOAA does not fund and never has funded any part of the SOHO mission. All the funding for operations comes from NASA, with program management support provided by ESA. There was a moment about a decade ago when NOAA seriously considered providing some funding to provide some redundancy in the provision of near real-time coronagraph images from SOHO and STEREO instruments, but that was never approved at higher levels of NOAA management.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Given that it appears….

…. that every youthful UK perpetrator of every leading perpetrator of every major intrusion into the networks of commercial firms and government agencies is autistic, maybe HM government need to consider a safe and supportive institution in which to confine such talented if non-neurotypical youth, away from the temptations of the Internet, which their parents are clearly not capable of doing.

Either that or, given the equally criminal proclivities of Tory ministers, just ship ‘em all off to Rwanda.

Veteran editors Notepad++ and Geany hit milestone versions

Re: Options for MacOS

Having no need for ReST, I continue, happily, to use BBEdit pretty much daily.

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

Is there a Reg unit for....

....the number of full English breakfasts necessary to produce enough grease to fuel a 787 on a transatlantic flight?

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

Re: Measure twice, cut once.

Or even just before lunch, when some people's minds stray....elsewhere. For an example, see: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/1783/was-the-noaa-n-prime-satellite-really-dropped-on-the-floor .

Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites nail online orders from orbit

Re: Excitement

Because there are many, many people in the world who have no access to such bandwidth.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Just need to note

....that the volume figures for the balloon referred to its size at causing altitude. It was, of course, much smaller at launch.

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Interesting edge case

Just what percentage of buyers of laptops, “pro” or others, Apple or others, is using the laptop to run ML code?

Fresh find shines new light on North Korea’s latest macOS malware

The expression "legitimate cryptocurrency exchange"....

....is the null set, right?

Crypto exists ONLY for criminals, speculators (also criminals, really), and bad actors (ransomware gangs, state "hackers," and the like), plus, of course, the ability to demonstrate to other investors that they're examples of the class of those born every minute/

Apple swipes left on the last Touch Bar Mac, replaces it with a pricier 14″ model

“Dream of a touchscreen Mac”

Nightmare, more like.

If you want to get your grubby fingers on an Apple device screen, buy an iPhone or an iPad.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

“We could be our own gatekeepers.”

Who is this “we” to whom you’re referring? The more-or-less It-savvy typical Reg reader, or the billion or so yutzes with smartphones around the world?

I realize that Apple is far from perfect in many ways, but they do a better job (that is, any job at all) at protecting their users from crapware. Far from perfect, but they at least try. Imagine those billion in-duh-visuals loading their phones with all the crapware that’s out there, and will have a boom when the EU regs go into effect.

Beta driver turned heads in the hospital

I remember that driver update

Good grief I'm old.

Now IBM sued for age discrim by its own HR veterans

Re: HR...

Rush to judgment? Moffat pleaded guilty.

Amazon unleashes Gen AI for product descriptions, curbs it for Kindle

Will this mean more or fewer....

....orders on which Amazon's fly by night third party "partners" don't ship the item pictured, described, and, sadly, ordered?

India set to launch Sun-spotting satellite on Saturday

Ouch!

Brexit propaganda on steroids? SOHO is an ESA spacecraft, and nine of the twelve instruments at launch (some have been shut down since, due to degradation of detectors or thermal issues over more than two decades of operation of hardware designed for 2 to 6 year lifetimes) had European principal investigators. The launch was provided by NASA, and spacecraft and science operations take place at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In all, an outstanding example of international cooperation.

Reports of the PC's death are greatly exaggerated, says IDC

Don’t believe everything from IDC you read about Mac sales

Yes, they were down early this year over pandemic and Apple Silicon introduction quarters. But second-generation Apple Silicon (M2) machines are available now, and the there’s this about enterprise sales: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/29/apple-hardware-is-a-benefit-to-enterprise-survey-reveals

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

And somehow….

…. Eudora is not even mentioned.

A Microsoft mail client for the Mac before Outlook? Who needed it?

Lost voices, ignored words: Apple's speech recognition needs urgent reform

Glad to hear that Dragon Speech, at least has improved with time

I recall using it a couple of decades ago on the Mac, and it ranged from almost passable to horrendous. Far too much work to correct all its errors, even after repeated trainings.

My principal complaints with dictation in macOS now are: its steadfast refusal to learn (e.g. that I use certain non-English words regularly — what, the voice recognition AI hasn't been trained for yiddish yet?), and scientific usage.... as in, the Sun is always capitalized in astrophysics, solar physics, and space weather journals. As a 'Murrican, the British periodical of the same name and capitalization has little to no resonance for me.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

How?

Because nothing shields you from the reality of having to deal with other people like being filthy rich.

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

CubeSats are low-hanging fruit

At the outfit I used to work for, considerably larger spacecraft — so-called “Small Explorers,” or SMEXes in the argot of that acronymophilic agency — were considered Class D in the hierarchy of risk management. That meant that individual components required less testing or could be adopted even though they had shorter lifetimes than the more expensive kit used in larger spacecraft, that schedules had less slack built into them, and that if I recall correctly, encryption was not required in communication between spacecraft and ground.

It was a totally different picture for even larger, more expensive missions.

Lower tolerance for risk drives cost and schedule (more testing and reviews required), higher tolerance makes the development faster and cheaper — bur also riskier.

Soon the most popular 'real' desktop will be the Linux desktop

I find your lack of evidence…. disturbing

There is no quantitative evidence at all that Mac users feel any need to use cloud implementations of macOS for but a tiny percentage of niche cases — and those are mere substituting cloud versions for what had been, for decades, hosted services, e.g. running your own mailserver.

The vast majority of Mac users use the OS on laptops and, to a lesser extent these days, desktops. And though it should probably go without saying, the number of users of macOS continues to dwarf the number of people who like to fiddle with Linux on the desktop. To each their own.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Am I the only one here old enough to remember....

....that that "X" logo was the one use day Xerox in the 1960s? Wonder if they still own the trademark....