Posts by Joe Gurman

Lufthansa bans Apple AirTags on checked bags

Might want to update this article

https://airwaysmag.com/lufthansa-not-bannig-airtags/

PC shipments are still on the decline – unless you're Apple

So which Apple promo specifically are we discussing?

In general, Apple doesn't offer promo pricing, though sometimes they will throw in an Apple gift card if you buy one from column A (say, a laptop) and one from column B (say, Air Pods). They also offer, every year (repeat: every year) a smallish freebee of some sort if you buy your college-bound offspring a MacBook of one kind or another over the summer before the kid leaves for Old Ivy or Enormous State U.

Apple authorized resellers such as B&H, Adorama, Amazon, and the like regularly offer a pittance off the Apple list price on Macs, but again, I (and I may be getting hazy with age) haven't noticed any increase in the frequency or size of those discounts this year, or indeed at any time during the pandemic.

Disclaimer: I get too much email from the Cupertino Fruit Co. (I was going to type "far too much," but then I thought of all the email I get from political candidates and their friends every hour of every day in an election year in the US, and realized there was an order of magnitude difference), but I'd know if they'd offered serious discounts on anything. But Apple just doesn't do that. They might eat an unaccustomed hit to their much-celebrated net margin on a given product if there are supply chain-related increases in critical components (as is currently rumored to be the case for the mighty CPU chips in their iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max), but the prices rarely go down for any line of product; indeed, they got kudos from the media for not raising the price of the current crop of fondletoys in a year of 10% inflation, continuing supply chain issues, and mainland Chinese missiles flying over the island where all their CPUs are manufactured.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

Um….

What’s an ‘incandescent” bulb?

Open standards body for digital wallets announced

Right now, Tim Cook is right

In Apple Wallet, account information is kept only in the CPU’s secure enclave. Never goes into memory, much less the grimey, security-clueless hands of vendors. Does anyone else offer that hardware + software? If not, interoperability and openness is good for thieves, and not s good for everyone else.

Apple warned by US lawmakers over using Chinese YMTC chips in new iPhone

Re: Land of the Free...

Marco Rubio and his communist pals can take my fondletoy out of my cold, dead hands, but not before.

No, Apple, you may not sell iPhones without chargers

The Bolsonaro regime

....is pretty much about destroying the Amazon basin, and thus the world, so I wouldn't rush to trust their definition of "environmental benefit."

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

And while we’re at it….

….let’s take sledgehammers to the looms, shall we?

There are certainly a plethora of poorly implemented or downright useless “features” in every modern desktop UI, but there are also a whole lot more features, full stop. Haven’t noticed that the percentage has really changed much.

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Once fashionable?

Maybe all the Apple Stores the UK are in rehab ciliated, old buildings with good bones, but a number in the US are at ground level on public streets, and ram raiding is very definitely still a thing.

Microsoft, Activision Blizzard have days to show merger won't harm competition

Dirty pool, what?

Dumping a five-day response order on MS right at the start of a major, long holiday weekend in the US (Labor Day).

Re: World of Warcraft

It was very good of AB to port WoW to Apple Silicon, but how do we know that Redmond will be as generous?

Then again, since AB have only kept WoW going on the Mac because there are a substantial number of punters willing to pay for it by the month, we can at least hope MS won’t scoff at the added lucre.

Xcel smart thermostat users lose their cool after power company locks them out

"No so smart after all"

Smart for the generating company, and smart for its other customers. The stupidity was the subscribers', who clearly didn't read and understand the T&C — which were pretty obvious.

And that, kids, is why I'll never own a "smart" thermostat [*] or "smart" appliance that turns over control, without asking, to the leccy company, or anyone else for that matter. I may be stupid, but I'm not that stupid.

[*] In fact, a "smart" thermostat came with the installation of a new heat pump four or five years ago. I read the T&C for setting up a connection to the mother ship (in this case, the manufacturer of both heat pump and thermostat). It was when I got to the point where the "agreement" allowed the manufacturer not only to access all of my browser history, but to sell that information to anyone they chose, that I clicked "cancel" rather than "agree." Alas, I'll never be able to change the settings from afar (not all that terribly useful since the pandemic started) or put a pretty background on the colo[u]r display.

NASA scrubs Artemis SLS Moon rocket launch

Re: 200% trust in NASA

This is literally _not_ rocket science. It's 100% rocket _engineering_.

— Former employee of a four-letter acronym US gumming agency, and a scientist

The truth about that draft law banning Uncle Sam buying insecure software

Not really a change

At least at the US federal agency where I worked until about four years ago. You simply weren’t allowed to buy software or hardware that hadn’t been checked out by the FBI and certified as safe to put on machines on a government network.

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

“Macs, which are, after all, expensive”

Particularly in business and government, try to get past this patently false assertion when examined in the light of total cost of ownership. Look at IBM’s experience in this regard, and consider the amount of handholding new Linux desktop users need.

South Korea's lunar orbiter launches and phones home happily

Is there another kind of camera?

"[M]ake images out of photons"

I mean, there are electron "cameras" that produce images by scattering electrons off things, but by and large....

Micron releases DDR5 DRAM ready for next-gen servers

Gotta have configurable memory for server, I guess

But discreet memory components, with slots for them on motherboards.... how quaint.

Intel to sell Massachusetts R&D site, once home to its only New England fab

And then there was the whole enclosure airflow direction issue

Iirc, it was "IBM sucks, but DEC blows."

Know the difference between a bin and /bin unless you want a new doorstop

After working in France for six months….

…. Thirty years ago, I think of it as la poubelle. Certainly prevents mixups.

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

How to mourn?

Party like it’s 1995.

Apple gets lawsuit over Meltdown and Spectre dismissed

What a novel concept in the law

At least for non-lawyers: That a party must be able to prove they've suffered some damage before bringing suit for damages. Duh.

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems all too well

Face facts

The Linux desktop will never be as big as macOS now is, much less Windows.

We sat through Apple's product launch disguised as a dev event so you don't have to

Re: Are they sure about this

The OS also has a feature dubbed Rapid Security Response that can install vulnerability patches as normal software updates without needing a full iOS update process.

This sounds like an attack vector that would be irresistible to black hats and 3 letter agencies alike.

----

And yet, it's been in place and used quasi-regularly for updating XProtect, Gatekeeper, MRT, and so on for years. Have you heard of any such attacks, against systems where SIP hasn't been disabled?

It might be worth asking

....how many iPad users actually want to side load software not in the App Store. And for that matter, whether they want to risk the old "hive of villainy" model in an age of adware, ransomware, and so on.

Starlink's success in Ukraine amplifies interest in anti-satellite weapons

Re: Would ground/plane based laser be effective ?

Satellites that have been serviced, and had parts retrieved and returned for earth for study showed _lots_ (many thousands over a few years) of impacts from such debris, including paint stripped from Space Shuttles by the highly reactive, if extremely tenuous, atomic oxygen at those altitudes.

Most of the debris, of course, had impacted solar panels, which tend to be most of the surface area of earth-orbiting spacecraft. While that may have degraded the output of those arrays, it didn't do sufficient damage to affect the missions involved.

Re: Would ground/plane based laser be effective ?

A directed-energy "solution" to constellations of communications satellites could degrade service, but replacements could be launched faster than they could be knocked out. Unless, of course, the Chinese hired SpaceX to shoot down their own satellites with another constellation, this time of killer sats. I wouldn't put it past Mr. Musk to accept a sufficiently lucrative offer.

The only saving grace in such an idiotic war would be that the satellites are for the most part, orbiting at altitudes used by not much else, so the immense cloud of debris the destruction would create wouldn't be likely to affect other spacecraft.

France levels up local video game slang with list of French terms to replace foreign words

This nonsense

....all goes back to la loi no 94-665 du 4 août 1994 relative à l'emploi de la langue française, the project of Jacques Toubon, the French minister of culture at the time. Preserving the French language, particularly against the insidious creep of English into it, was viewed as a sacred duty.

The law, of course, is known to my French friends as "la loi de Jack Allgood."

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Wait..

What fraction of desktop/laptop browser usage did IE have back in the day referred to in the article?

And what fraction of the mobile browser market does Safari command today?

Apple, and, ER, eggs that have gone off.

Apple's grip on iOS browser engines disallowed under latest draft EU rules

I'm sorry....

....but trying to be as courteous as possible, that "argument" is the product of the south and of a horse headed north. Your choice is in buying a device that does what you want. Want Chrome? Buy an Android phone. Done and dusted.

My choice, on the other hand, is to buy a phone that doesn't allow any hive of scum and villainy aboard, other than than the manufacturer. Might not be your choice, but it's (sorry, can't bring myself to use uppercase) my choice.

Re: Shiny shiny ...

If I invented a revolutionary, new television that did (I don't know) some wonderful things that would make hunters scoop them up like hotcakes, but which were hard-wired not to show Fox "News," what would the "markets" (*cough*) committee say? The buyers who wanted that "feature" could always buy one of the TVs manufactured by literally dozens of other vendors. They might not have my spiffy, new features, but they'd have the product they wanted.

Now explain to me what EU bureaucrats' interference is required in this case. If Apple's limited web browser implementation is to terrible, there are simple (and less expensive) alternatives at hand.

macOS Server discontinued after years on life support

As the fruit company itself mentioned in its announcement

The purportedly most popular remaining features of the server product, Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server, have over time become features of mac OS. So not so much third-party action necessary.

Brave, DuckDuckGo to unplug Google's AMP where possible

I have a problem

I cannot use the words "trust" and "Google" in the same sentence, without a negative somewhere in there, I cannot lie.

'Bigger is better' is back for hardware – without any obvious benefits

Breathes fire?

The maximum sustained power consumed by the Mac Studio with the M1 Ultra CPU is 370 W. Quite a bit more than the most efficient, full-sized laptops, but quite a bit less than a lot of full-sized desktops. Don't mistake efficient thermal design for wasteful power consumption (e.g. Xeons).

NASA in 'serious jeopardy' due to big black hole in security

Some unintended irony here

The reason so many NASA users request elevated privileges is that they want to be able to install security updates either before the IT contractor gets around to their machine(s), or prevent the patch installation procedure from taking over their machine during the last two or three hours of submission windows for major funding proposals or conference abstracts.

In one case, a Microsoft Office “upgrade” did exactly that to quite a few scientists in the outfit I used to work for. It’s the kind of thing makes unwilling elevated privilege users out of many non-IT professionals.

Re: No real changes

A bit of a niggle, but the Rovers were controlled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Caltech. That institution is under contract to NASA, and thus has to follow a lot of NASA rules and regs, but NASA has at times had a difficult time getting the contractor JPL has doing its institutional IT to follow all of the corporate procedures.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

Not an Apples to apples comparison?

Apple claims that its Apple silicon-based machines don’t need as much RAM as, say, Intel-based ones because (1) the memory access is so much faster than in conventional, off-the-SOC designs, the memory bandwidth is so much less and (2) their CPUs just move the data in and out faster, too.

I haven’t used such a machine yet, so I can’t say whether I’d agree in practice, but people doing light and medium video creation loads appear to agree Apple’s done it right. The good news? Intel may catch up in two to three years…. with where Apple is now.

RIP Katherine Johnson: The extraordinary NASA mathematician astronauts trusted over computers

And now….

….the NASA headquarters building in Washington DC is named for Ms. Johnson.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

In the manner of the BOFH....

.... "Frank" should have torched the boss's new car.

Russia's naval exercise near Ireland unlikely to involve cable-tapping shenanigans

The US Navy....

....has a submarine dedicated to exactly this kind of operation; hardly "advanced," because it was commissioned nearly two decades ago. It contains any extra section amidships to allow deploying, among other things, special-purpose submersibles. Think that might include fibre optic mods?

Back up for a minute – Backblaze HD reliability stats show oldies can be goodies

Do the stats distinguish....

....between pre-HGST acquisition and post-acquisition WDC stats? Not so long ago, WD had a reputation for some dodgy drive models. Since purchasing HGST, they've done considerably better, word-of-mouth-wise.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Re: IPv6 is actually there in the home user worls

Don't know about elsewhere, but in the US, that would indicate that the editors are at universities, government sites, and Alphabet/Meta. All of them using their employers' networks to do something other than what they're paid for.

Re: re: In a global pandemic

Guess I won't be shopping in M&S anytime soon.

My favorite, here in the States, is people who wear masks, but pull them down so their noses are uncovered. I could waste time wondering what they're thinking, but I don't think they are.

Re: Won't happen in my lifetime

"If the question is whether the majority of public internet traffic runs over IPv6, then I suspect that is quite likely to happen over the next 10 years."

Trouble is, I heard that ten years ago.

Japan solves 5G airliner conundrum: Keep mobe masts 200m from airport approach paths. That's it

I’m not close to being an expert

….but I have read elsewhere that not only are US 5G transmitters operating at a different frequency range from that in other places, as noted here, but also operating at something like 2x the radiated power. Perhaps something to do with the more spread-out. Suture of some American cities?

That aside, it appears to that parts of the US (and other) airline industry has had years to replace their radar altimeters with ones with no sideband issues vis a vis 5G, but have chosen to allow the issue to become literally a last-minute confrontation, in the hope of soaking the taxpayer for what ought to be a shareholder/passenger financial responsibility.

And not just the US carriers: business news outlets carried a good deal of coverage yesterday of the Emirates CEO bloviating about an “issue” his airline had lots of time to mitigate.

AWS postmortem: Internal ops teams' own monitoring tools went down, had to comb through logs

Re: DNS

Or BGP.

Assange extradition case goes to UK Home Secretary as High Court rules he can be sent to US for trial

Re: Missing the point

What on earth makes you think he will not?

The only thing certain about these goings on is that quality barristers will be able to bill a lot of hours.

It's primed and full of fuel, the James Webb Space Telescope is ready to be packed up prior to launch

An understatement

"Fingers crossed the telescope will finally take to space on 22 December."

How about all movable parts crossed, and all bodily sphincters puckered up?

Alleged Brit SIM-swapper will kill himself if extradited to US for trial, London court told

Re: "he might commit suicide, making his an "exceptional" case"

It is getting rather frequent, isn't it?

1. Every temporarily successful cyber criminal or social engineer in the UK is on the autism spectrum;

2. every one of those apprehended had a terminally ill mum or disabled wife or yet unborn child or some other family member who could not get care from anyone but Billy the (unextraditable) Kid;

3. if you even mention the word "extradition" within the suddenly sensitive lad's hearing, he will kill himself (and it's always he, isn't it?);

4. the similarity in too many cases indicates to me that that the defense briefs are all reading from the same script, and it makes me wonder whether the defendants ever have a say in the matter. Does none of them ever in fact say to his solicitor, "It's a fair cop," only to have the lawyers laugh?

Does anyone think that HM Wandsworth and Belmarsh are really any better than federal penitentiaries in the US? (I stress "federal," since so many states contract out their prisons to large contractors who may poorly trained guards minimum wage).

Russia's orbital insanity is almost beyond redemption – but there's space for improvement

Thuggism

Putin's Russia has made an art of it, on the ground, in the air, in space. What else would you expect from a former (not very good) KGByushnik?

Now that's a splash down: Astronauts spend 8-hour trip to Earth in diapers after SpaceX capsule toilet breaks

The boldly go line is cute

....but the history of space toilets, including the ones on US Shuttles and the ISS, is rife (ripe?) with examples of malfunctioning health and safety equipment. Space is hard, space toilets are harder.

Apple's macOS Monterey upgrades some people's laptops to doorstops

Guess I'm luckier

Two iMacs (2017 and 2020 Intel), both updated without issue.

This is way less serious than an update bricking your system, but Monterey appears to have broken then Slideshow screensaver for many users. No productivity impact, purely esthetic.