Posts by Lennart Sorensen

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: dollars over sense

The money would last longer than the way he is currently using it.

OpenCart owner turns air blue after researcher discloses serious vuln

More like not a thought at all. It's "safe enough" after all. At least according to someone that doesn't actually understand security.

Will anybody save Linux on Itanium? Absolutely not

How do slanted characters become a disaster?

AMD SEV OMG: Trusted execution in VMs undone by bad hypervisors' cache meddling

Re: "attacker is running a malicious hypervisor"

You mean there are people who actually believed this stuff would work and are using it under that impression? And paying extra for it?

Watt's the worst thing you can do to a datacenter? Failing to RTFM, electrically

Re: Plus ca change....

Well CGA, EGA,Tokenring, atari/commodore/sega/etc joystick users and many others might disagree about what that connector is for. Serial only started using it later on, so I think serial is the one that should have picked something else. I certainly do not assume it is a serial port on the machines I have around.

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Oh yes I remember SLS (installed it in 1992 I think it was, back when the kernel version was 0.97patchlevel who knows what) and then later slackware which did improve a bit on SLS but not a hell of a lot. Eventually found redhat and realized you could do package management much better than SLS (and hence slackware) had done and stuck with that until the bugs drove me nuts and I switched to Debian which actually had even better package design and management than redhat, and haven't found anything better yet so that's what I am sticking with for now. I never could understand why anyone would enjoy putting up with the pathetic design of slackware (or any of the BSDs for that matter, that user space and packaging system is just horrible to use).

At least we have choices.

And I do use systemd and want to use it these days because it turns out it really is a much better way to handle init even if it is totally different than what we had before. It actually solved problems the other init systems never could because they were all that sad unfortunately.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: No good people, not good!

Well the Debian package format has always been far better than the mess that is rpm, and Debian's updater certainly has reliably done in place upgrades far var longer than Red Hat has ever managed to do that. That was the main reason I moved to Debian from Red Hat about 25 years ago now. Yum and dnf and whatever else RedHat has added since hasn't done anything to fix that rpm is just not a well designed package format, and the source packages are even worse.

Microsoft dabbles in self-repair with Surface devices now DIY-friendlier

Re: EOL of Windows 10

If they really cared they would just drop the artificial hardware requirements in windows 11. My 11 year old thinkpad is running insider builds of windows 11, and has bee for years, and has never had an issue. Microsoft offered to install it back before they added the artificial requirements, and of course it installed fine, and still does. They don't have to continue to support windows 10, they can just let all the machines switch to 11 instead. Not a problem except they decided to make it one.

Re: Malicious compliance?

Still sounds better than the apple program here you have to supply serial numbers and such to even get parts for a device. Certainly under the apple program a repair shop can't buy and stock parts to provide quick service, they would have to get your device, order parts from apple, wait for them, then repair the device. Totally useless, but of course that's how Apple wants it to be. It has to sound like they are doing something while not actually doing it.

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

Seems alive and well to me. I see quite a few "HD Radio" stations in the Toronto area at least, with multiple channels on a single frequency to pick from. The radio in my 2012 Prius V has no problem using it.

EU mandated messaging platform love-in is easier said than done: Cambridge boffins

Re: Not sure it is such a complex task...

Well sure for single user to single user you could use pgp, although you need to handle the secure key exchange and authentication first.

Given many of the chat systems support groups, that gets way more complicated.

Different systems have different features after all. Does everyone have to implement all the features or do services have to drop features that are not universally supported?

And if you change the protocol, you just broke compatibility with all the existing clients on that service. So much for making things more interoperable when you start by breaking everyone.

Re: Reminds me of the early 2000's...

Sure but that still meant you had to sign up to all the services, it just provided one convenient client to manage all of them at once. That's easy.

What this law wants to do is make users of different services somehow (not sure by which kind of magic it should happen) talk to each other without signing up for all the different services.

Tesla hits the brakes on rollout of Full Self-Driving code to new users

Re: Umm..?

They can't push an update they don't have. First they have to fix it. Given what they have managed to create so far, how long do you think that will take them?

Americans have the right to livestream police traffic stops … probably

It does seem a lot of the police believe the oath means "to server and protect the police" rather than "to serve and protect the public".

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Am I being Dense?

Fortunately since DNS uses IDN encoding for any non ascii domains, and IDN encodes UTF using ascii, it will in fact still be ascii in the request and hence it will work. The domain name will in fact be even longer and more effective in that case due to the encoding.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

I loved the Amiga OS (still like it although it is of course not useful to actually use anymore).

I had no love for BeOS. I see no resemblance at all.

Re: If only Jean-Louis Gassée had not over-played his hand..

Lucky for Apple that they went with NextStep instead or they would not be around anymore. Apple needed a modern OS to move forward, and BeOS wasn't a modern OS. Designing a new OS without security and multiuser in mind was idiotic when it was already well known how to do that. Unix had been doing it for decades, Windows NT was doing it (at least Microsoft realized that designing a new system from scratch with some API compatibility as the way forward for them), there was no excuse for BeOS to do what they did. They only fixed MacOS's lack of SMP and preemptive multitasking, without fixing the other major flaws it had. Adding multimedia support on top of any good OS is no big deal. Designing your OS around it at the expense of security and multiuser flexibility (you know a computer could be used by more than one person in a house) was just dumb.

I remember using the BeBOX, with it's nifty cpu meters on the front for the two PPC603e chips. The GUI was terrible (those title bars that were not the full width of the windows looked dumb, and put buttons in places you didn't expect them to be). Eventually tried to put linux on it instead to do something useful with a dual cpu machine, but it was never very well supported and much faster multicore x86 machines became available not too long after.

Remember two wrongs don't make a right.

US postal service electrifyies its next-gen delivery fleet

Re: So who paid for that "decision"?

Given how horribly obsolete and inefficient the vehicles they were planing to get were, it would have cost a fortune in operational costs. They were a complete joke.

And nothing can compare to the politically motivated taxpayer funded waste that is the military suppliers. I suppose the for profit healthcare system tries to give it a run for it's money though.

Firefox points the way to eradicating one of the rudest words online: PDF

First thing I had to do with firefox introduced their built in PDF support was to figure out how to turn it off since it failed miserably at rendering the first PDFs I encountered with it. If it doesn't work 100%, do NOT make it the new default without asking and making it really easy to turn off. I don't care if they add markup and editing support since they apparently can't get basic rendering right.

Nvidia admits mistake, 'unlaunches' 12GB RTX 4080

So alternatives like intel that can't make anything with decent performance or ATI/AMD that has never figured out how to write stable drivers (which is a shame since their hardware is good).

Upgrading what might be the world's oldest running Linux install

Re: Triggers Broom

Well the Debian installer has only been used once for the installation. The root user has only been created once in the passwd file, although clearly with the password updated over time (I would hope). So yeah I think it can be considered the same install. It's not the same physical machine anymore though. I have a 486 around with Debian installed on it and upgraded for years. It was installed in around 1999 or 2000, as far as I remember using potato that was under developement because slink just didn't want to install. Haven't used the machine for about 7 or 8 years now because the poor HD sounds terrible (ball bearings don't last forever) and I don't believe Debian supports running on a 486 anymore since 2015. I think I should put a compact flash IDE disk in it and use it for DOS gaming instead. It used to be good at that before it became a dedicated linux server for many years.

Re: LVM over RAID over LVM

I suspect LVM at the bottom to allow combining different disk types and sizes into pools, then raid on top of those pools to redundancy, and then LVM on top for flexibility in allocation of the disk space.

I have never done that, by just throwing money at the raid layer to keep things identical and hence simpler, but I can see how lvm would allow doing it cheaper and with less initial planning required for handling future upgrades.

Re: Triggers Broom

Yeah no way is it using the same motherboard/cpu/ram that it was originally installed with. That would not be 64 bit for sure. Nor would it have had USB ports at all.

VMware walks back ban on booting vSphere from SD cards or thumb drives

So if you can't boot your server from USB how do you install the OS in the first place? Clearly vmware is being incredibly stupid if they want to remove USB boot support from servers.

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

Having had the "pleasure" of using BeOS on an actual BeBOX, I guess to me BeOS never had a chance because it was a bad design. It wasn't designed with multiuser in mind from the start, and other annoying issues that were inexcusable at that time. Sure it did some multimedia, but so did my Amiga years earlier. Of course I was already not convinced object oriented was a good solution at that time, so the design didn't win any points there either. Apple certainly made the right choice by switching to nextstep rather than considering BeOS as a MacOS replacement.

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: how hard can it be

Using GPS makes sense when you have a GPS navigation system already and you want accurate time without the user having to keep fixing it. Of course Honda has managed to show that they are not good enough to actually use GPS correctly for this. My Prius which does have a GPS system does not use if for the clock. It has a couple of buttons for me to set it. Maybe the Toyota engineers were on to something when they kept it simple, even though I thought it might have made sense to let it at least have an option to set it by GPS. Or perhaps they thought since not every trim level had a GPS, the clock might as well work the same in every trim level.

And at least in the case of linux, they have already been working on the unix epoch issue. 64 bit systems no longer have any problem, and 32 bit ones are close to fixed, so at least they seem to be working on it with about 16 years to spare, which is a lot better than the Y2K work that was rather last minute.

Re: how hard can it be

GPS is trying to fit a lot in a small message. So they went with 10 bits for week number and 19 bits for seconds of the week. So 29 bits handles the entire date + time for a 20 year period. Newer GPS signal formats did extend the week to 13 bits making the entire message 32 bit and handling 157 years with second level precision. A rather efficient format really. Unfortunately only the newest GPS satellites use the 13 bit week format, most are still 10 bit, and almost no receivers are taking advantage of the 13 bit option yet, probably since most of the signals they receive wouldn't contain it yet.

Keeping crap like day of week, length of each month in days and such out of the format simplifies things a lot. Converting to human format can be done in software from the raw signal afterwards.

So GPS managed 20 year cycles with 29 bits (less than half of your proposal) while the newest GPS does 157 years in 32 bits (exactly half your proposal). I think the designers were rather clever.

Never mind the Panic button – there's a key to Compose yourself

Well I could see for very infrequent use, your click in a window method might be convenient, but compared to the convenience and flexibility of wincompose, it really doesn't seem like a match. And of course hard to compete with free and open source in the case of wincompose. But using a compose key certainly does have a higher learning curve for sure.

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: Moved to MariaDB

But so is postgres, in fact I would say it is even easier to get started with and it works better. So there is no reason to use mysql at all. Except of course for the fact so many other projects insist on you using it as the backend unfortunately.

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Re: Physical key

The relay disconnecting the hybrid battery stays off unless you turn on the ignition and the computer checks everything is OK. They don't want that done unless you are actually going to start the car since depleting the hybrid battery is a much much bigger hassle than dealing with a drained 12V aux battery. I have only seen it drained when the lights were left on in the car.

Re: Physical key

Or you could just: unlock driver's door with physical key, pop hood, connect charger to the terminals for boosting the battery, hit power button to turn on car, and the car computer will fire up and start charging the aux batter from the main battery instantly. Totally trivial. Only had to do it twice when someone left the lights on in the car (would be nice of toyota had made them turn off after a while like VW has been doing for multiple decades).

Re: Internet dependency

My toyotas both beep at you if you take the key fob out of the car while it is on. If both people have their keys then it doesn't of course as long as one of them is still in the car, but if only one key is with you and you try to leave, you will know. This is not a problem.

Magnanimous Apple will allow people to fix their iPhones using parts bought from its Self Service Repair program

Oh don't worry, Apple's prices are much higher than that.

Re: Fair?

Well apparently to replace the keyboard on a macbook requires buying an assembly containing the entire top of the case (case, touchpad, keyboard, battery, etc). Apple won't sell you just a keyboard. SO that makes your keyboard repair $400 rather than $50 that most other laptops would be.

I suspect most people would rather go to a repair shop that knows what they are doing (which means one that isn't authorized by apple of course) and pay $100 than pay apple $400 for an assembly to do it themselves. Of course Apple has no interest in allowing that. They only want to pretend they are allowing repairs.

Well using glue all over is a choice they made that they didn't have to do.

Boeing's Starliner capsule corroded due to high humidity levels, NASA explains, and the spaceship won't fly this year

Re: probably a case along the lines ...

How is spacex intel? spacex at least tries to innovate and compete. intel looks a lot more like the old dominant players in the business happy to keep selling people more of the same until someone comes along and starts to eat their business (like AMD sometimes does). And intel has made plenty of flops in terms of design (pentium 4, iAPX 432, itanium, etc, not to mention failing to get new process nodes to work while their competitors catch up). intel reminds me of boeing these days. They think they know everything better than everyone else and then things go wrong, but they manage to fix it eventually and claw their way back.

So no spacex is not like intel.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: Don't mention the...

Well turns out 1980 was also when Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and a bunch of others introduced DST. So unfortunately they do in fact match since 1970.

After quietly switching to slower NAND in an NVMe SSD, Western Digital promises to be a bit louder next time

Oh like the Dlink DGE-530T where revision A and B were 3Com/Marvell Yukon chips and then revision C was a DGE-528T (which no one wanted) using a realtek 8169. Far inferior network card and of course totally incompatible with drivers, and since dlink didn't want people to know it was a realtek it had it's own PCI ID so linux didn't even know it was a supported chip until someone (me in this case) added the PCI ID for it to the kernel. We of course told IT to stop buying those cards anymore.

Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Sub-$600 midranger makes premium phones feel frivolous

Re: a new outdated phone.

Well they came out pretty much the same time.

Of course given the A12 gives half the storage, half the ram, slower video, LCD rather then AMOLED screen, at lower resolution and refresh rate, weights more, is bigger, has much lower quality cameras, runs an older version of android, no IP67 water resistance, etc, I would hope it was only half as much. But if none of those differences are things you would use, then half the price is great. In my case I bought the A52 (not 5G) since I like the features, but have no use for 5G and saved some money that way, even though Samsung doesn't even offer the non 5G version in Canada, so I bought it on ebay from the US instead, where it appears it was aimed at the puerto rico market (it defaulted to spanish).

Lenovo refreshes workstation ThinkPads with 11th-gen Intel CPUs, RTX graphics, 5G

16:9 is outdated? Well I remember 4:3 and then 16:10 (1920x1200 monitors were great) before 16:9 took over because everything wanted to match HDTV resolution. So 16:10 is going back to a better resolution in my opinion, but it certainly isn't because 16:9 is outdated, rather 16:10 seems to be the one that became outdated.

Dependable Debian is like a rock in a swirling gyre of 'move fast and break things', and version 11 is no different

Certainly doing specific architectures is no problem using the official mirroring tool:

https://www.debian.org/mirror/ftpmirror#how

Doing specific releases you can't, but that's not nearly as huge a problem given how much is often shared between stable, testing and unstable.

Director, deputy director, CTO of Free Software Foundation quit after Stallman installation

So the board regrets it but not enough to undo it? I guess any board that would let RMS rejoin will be too stubborn to admit they made a mistake, and given RMS said he isn't going to resign, I guess the only way he is leaving is that someone kicks him out, and clearly that won't be the current board planing to do that.

WiMAX? 'Dead with no known users': Linux tips code in the recycle bin

Well I do know of one company still making and selling Wimax gear, but I believe they run vxworks, not linux on their hardware. Certainly not much life left in wimax at this point.

'It's dead, Jim': Torvalds marks Intel Itanium processors as orphaned in Linux kernel

Unfortunately it is much easier to switch over a few programs at a time to 64 bit x86 while keeping your existing 32 bit code running using x86-64 than it is to migrate everything to a new platform all at once.

At least AMD did a better job cleaning up a bit while adding 64 bit than intel has ever done in the past when extending the x86 architecture. x87 had to die and adding more registers was desperately needed. AMD did a very good job on the polishing of intel's turd.

Re: Not the 2nd 64 Windows

NT 4 was only ever 32 bit, and that was all that ever ran on the powerpc, mips and alpha. There were 64 bit development work on the alpha, but it was canceled before release, so only itanium got 64 bit windows released initially to be joined by x86 later, and eventually arm.

As for being portable, well maybe for Microsoft code, but it only works on little endian, which certainly prevents some CPU targets from ever running windows. Only the fact powerpc, mips and arm can run both ways allowed windows to be ported to them, since they always run them in little endian mode for windows. Alpha and x86 of course were only ever little endian. Motorola 68k of course would never have a had a chance to run windows.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

I guess apkmirror can come in handy for that. Installing firefox 68 from there seems to be no problem.

Appeals judges toss out FTC win: What Qualcomm did to its rivals was 'hypercompetitive, not anticompetitive'

Re: Future standards

Wasn't that called GSM?

If you own one of these 45 Netgear devices, replace it: Kit maker won't patch vulnerable gear despite live proof-of-concept code

Re: It'd be interesting

I looked up one, the AC1450, and it is from 2013.