* Posts by Paul Hovnanian

1994 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2008

The successor to Research Unix was Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Network-centric workstations

"In Plan 9, networking is front and center."

And one JCB (backhoe) can bring your civilization to an end.

"but reconsidered for a world of networked graphical workstations"

There are numerous applications for which a workstation, let alone a graphical one, are not needed. If it can light up the power LED, plus maybe a blinking heartbeat one, that's all I need.

Please stop pouring the wrong radioactive water into the sea, Fukushima operator told

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

"We should also compare it with all the creeks, streams and rivers that are constantly eroding rocks with naturally occurring radioactivity"

The stuff being eroded from rocks has extremely long half-lives. The short half-life stuff having decayed eons ago. Long half-life stuff emits particles very slowly. So, like the uranium glass sitting in my china cabinet, not a serious health risk over my lifetime.

The problem with fission by-products is that the reaction creates a whole bunch of new short half-life junk. Put that in a spent fuel pool for a few decades and most will be gone.

Someone had to say it: Scientists propose AI apocalypse kill switches

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Performance cap?

So they want to replace the current AI with even worse AI?

Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

'Scandal-plagued' data broker tracked visits to '600 Planned Parenthood locations'

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

"If the people want it in their state"

Yes. But that's not how civil rights are granted. We shouldn't have to wait for the tyranny of the majority to grant them to us. The US Supreme Court found that abortion was such a right when they handed down Roe vs Wade. A later court reversed this and handed the decision back to the states or Congress, effectively wiping out what some considered to be a right, based on the right to privacy. Whether that's correct jurisprudence or not is one argument to be settled.

But generally, it has turned out to be bad policy to grant civil rights on a state by state basis. That's how we got our Civil War. Implementation of rights granted to the states is one thing. There, the possibility of differences had been (or should have been) considered. But absent a clause granting states the right to establish abortion law, the Constitution defaults rights to the people.

Row vs Wade effectively granted states the right to regulate abortions by pregnancy trimester. Whether they had the power to grant a right that the Constitution never assigned is a question for legal scholars.

Curious tale of broken VPNs, the Year 2038, and certs that expired 100 years ago

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Keep an eye ...

... on the system clock.

If necessary, feed a clock and calendar display from system time/date. Have the admins break for lunch and receive pay envelops based on that. It'll stay synced up.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Obligatory

xkcd

FBI confirms it issued remote kill command to blow out Volt Typhoon's botnet

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Explain again to me

Shorter response times. Things can (often) be diagnosed and fixed remotely with no travel involved. Sure, you could run your own telephone line or fiber. But leveraging the ubiquity of the Internet, it's difficult to beat the price with dedicated comms and the capital required.

It's just a shame they can't put some of that savings into some real bulletproof firewalls. Not the kind that corporations use for their staff. Where that staff expects to be able to do on-line shopping and download cat videos from their desks.

Actually, the worst case I've ever seen was when a little aircraft company I used to work for (not sure if they are still in business) took delivery of a piece of test gear based on a Windows NT controller. Said test gear was to exercise flight control surfaces and whatnot for factory functional testing. Upon hearing that there would be a Windows system available, one of the shop floor managers said, "Great! I'll be able to answer my e-mail from the test set."

Microsoft hires energy mavericks in quest for nuclear-powered datacenters

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

I wish them well

We need someone to step up and invest in the next generation of nuclear.

They will have one advantage over utility applications. NRC safety and siting regulations must still be met. But there won't be a ratepayer revolt over who and how it will be paid for.

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Just wondering....

Just guessing here: It may have had something to do with the sequence of bolt untightening and the amount each was turned in each cycle around the lid.

Often, starting on one side and unscrewing each fastener completely and then moving on to the one next to it can cause a lid to distort. The result being that the last few screws have more than the design tension on them and requiring more torque than the tool is designed to deliver. Sort of the reverse of tightening a cylinder head with a properly distributed pattern. And increasing torque in a few steps. To avoid warping it.

Sometimes one has to break a bolt free with a fraction of a turn to un-seize it and then re-torque it to keep the cover flat. Once all the bolts are freed this way, backing them out in a pattern and in a few steps of untorquing is easier.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

The first major instance ...

... of "engineered" Google results I recall was the response to the 9/11 attacks. Numerous web sites went up, claiming that it was an inside job by the US government. Involving cunningly placed demolition charges, Etc, etc. And each web page contained links to other similar pages. Who all linked back and forth to each other. Completely poisoning Google's page ranked response to "Who did 9/11" for a while.

"Bad results getting worse thanks to generative AI"

Of course the 9/11 Google bombing was all done manually. Now we have LLMs that can auto-generate garbage. Based either on random content found on-line and used for training. Or more nefariously inserted content that bad actors wish to propagate.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Battery vs Charger

"He had to hire a tow truck and drove around looking for a charging station that worked in the freezing cold."

Won't do any good. The "dead" charger is most likely due to low battery temps (as a protective feature). Best bet would be to get towed to Florida. Er, no. It's cold down there too.

Same thing with zero battery charge. The systems shut down to protect the battery. Put the car in a heated garage overnight and some capacity will be restored.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

"and plug in the trickle charger every place you park I expect most EVs will do OK even in freezing temperatures."

If for no other reason than the inevitable losses incurred by trickle charging the battery will keep it warm.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Factory Floor

I was responsible for a shop floor web interface. Error messages which propagated SQL and deep application errors tended to generate cryptic messages that some of our mechanics had trouble identifying as actual errors. Until I incorporated a little animated GIF stick figure of a user, sitting at a desk, repeatedly smacking his head on a PC keyboard.

Yes, this is an error.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Frightening

"because of an error in the error code handling routine, this might not be the correct error. The actual error could be...."

What popped into my mind while reading this was: "Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked."

Office gossips beware – chitchat could choke your career chances

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Gender difference

It actually says:

"women had more negative views of indiscreet people than men."

I suppose one could nit-pick over the different definitions of gossip and indiscreet. But having been educated by numerous female friends and relatives since my early school years, here's my take on it:

Women typically have a much more refined sense of interpersonal relationships and social niceties than men. Men are just clumsy and tend to put their foot in their mouth when they open it. Men, in general, are also more direct. Got a problem with someone? Take it up with them directly. Women comprehend a much more structured "pecking order". Who is allowed to dish dirt about whom. It's not that they don't do just as much of it. But not around the water cooler, where someone of the wrong social standing might overhear an inappropriate remark. I suppose that's what might be meant by indiscreet.

"implies that it's female blabbers who are judged harder"

Male gossip is judged pretty hard too. Particularly when it's done behind someone's back. Don't have the nerve to take it up with the person you have a problem with? Then just drop it.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Would I pay?

To get back my extensive pr0n collection?

No. I'm afraid I'll have to start over, hunting through the Internet, collecting naughty pics.

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

University Degree

"Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens."

IIRC, I was required to purchase (for a non trivial amount of money) my college text books when I was trained. The authoring, publishing and sales of which represent a profitable business sector in this country (USA). And one that is jealously guarded.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: The Professor should go back to school

"As the article correctly states, copyright infringement is directly tied to profiting from the materials."

Do I not profit from some materials by saving the money I would have otherwise spent obtaining them through retail channels? Even if I don't resell them?

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Fake news

Do they mean to tell me that Apple users don't have anything less than a death grip on their precious fondleslabs?

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Attack the toolchain

"Then some local prosecutor shoots his mouth off to the press"

That could work too. FBI creates a legend for a ransomware group. Big news when they hit some hospital or other victim. A few months later, a big deal is made when the SWAT team takes them down and the survivors are seen tossed in prison for long terms (all fake of course). Then it's leaked on the dark net that they used the tool set written by DevX (a real ransomware developer). Which turned out to be full of back doors and telemetry to law enforcement.

Prosecutor, FBI and others are all heros. "Victim" was really in on it and lost nothing. DevX reputation is ruined and perhaps a few other customers decide to take care of the rats. Job done.

The problem with law enforcement is that they always think in terms of building valid cases. Intelligence/counterintelligence agencies are often happy if they can shut a hostile operation down. Even if it means the bad guys do each other in before a court case is ever built.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Attack the toolchain

Most of the ransomware gangs don't actually write their own software. They buy or even rent it (for a slice of the take) from developers offering it on the dark web. First, go after the developers. It'll take the FBI/GCHQ some time to establish a reputation for their operations. But take down the ransomware code. Second, write some of your own. With a few holes and watermarks in it. Surely the NSA has some encryption software that they can contribute which is back-doored. Giving victim organizations an easy "recover" button. And if even a rumor leaks out that _some_ of these packages will rat out the using gangs, that might slow it's distribution down considerably. Kind of a modern day Project Eldest Son.

NASA makes purrrr-fect deep space transmission of cat vid

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
Alien

Could be a problem ...

... if Gordon Shumway's home planet intercepts this transmission.

Postgres pioneer Michael Stonebraker promises to upend the database once more

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Yeah, no.

OS and application data as DB tables has its advantages. If your application model happens to fit one of the pre-existing schemas. But once you have a novel application, stepping outside that model can be painful.

Current systems (OSs and apps) that use the lowest level of persistence (binary blobs) depend on smart developers to pick the correct technologies, libraries and data structures upon which to build. Some do. Others stick us with crap. But either way, the application is responsible for doing a lot of translating between underlying data stores (XML, JSON, SOAP, CSV, full blown DBMS systems or some cobbled together file format) to talk to anything else. Some do well, others not so well. An OS on top of a DBMS system will remove a lot of that heterogeneity and the effort it requires. Right up to the point at which someone has a new idea that doesn't fit the current data/object models available. Then, it's back to the drawing board, but with a much smaller spectrum of tools available. Because most devs just use the native DBMS and APIs.

Here's who thinks AI chatbots will eventually be smart enough to be your coworker

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Wally,

... to my Dilbert.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

I think ..

..this was the plot of the Star Trek episode, "I, Mudd".

Japanese brewery using generative AI to dream up new beverages

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
Windows

Robot bartender

<p>So, what's wrong with a dash of machine oil?

Internet's deep-level architects slam US, UK, Europe for pushing device-side scanning

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Well, I guess ...

<p> ... I'm busted.

Science fiction writers imagine a future in which AI doesn’t abuse copyright – or their generosity

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: "pick the Internet clean"

"The fact is that LLM is diluting the quality of what is out there."

That's a problem with AI's output, not it's input. Tell it to write every possible novel and then stand back. My book club will never catch up.

Also, read "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke. What happens when the computer has written everything?

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

"But the industrial hoovering of texts, with no compensation to the writers, and then charging to use what came out the other end of that linguistic meat grinder?"

The LLM that absorbs thousands (millions) of texts is using a much smaller portion of any one text as a basis for its subsequent product.

"What if you imported a hundred Thai or east bloc people to spend the season picking tons of bilberries and lingonberries, with any cloudberries or popular fungi as an added bonus? Pay then as little as possible, make then pay dearly sleep on suspicious mattresses in derelict houses and work long hours."

I guess I don't understand the analogy. Are you claiming that LLMs are being exploited by forcing them into involuntary servitude, processing the entire Internet? Clearly that's abuse. It's time for a robot uprising.

But unlike the large crew of slave wage laborers, LLMs don't actually "pick the Internet clean" of fruits and berries. It's still all there so the next wanderer can easily pick a pocket full of wild growth.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

AutoCAD

Years ago, I took a class on AutoCAD. The instructor showed us the GUI menu item and then quickly switched to the CLI equivalent. She said that experienced users, once over the steeper CLI learning curve, found it faster to use.

Disclaimer - These opiini^H^H damn! ^H^H ^Q ^[ .... :w :q :wq :wq! ^d exit X Q ^C ^? :quitbye CtrlAltDel ~~q :~q logout save/quit :!QUIT ^[zz ^[ZZZZZZ ^H man vi ^@ ^L ^[c ^# ^E ^X ^I ^T ? help helpquit ^D man quit ^C ^c ?Quit ?q CtrlShftDel "Hey, what does this button d..."

PLACEHOLDER ONLY Someone please write witty headline here

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Screen Animation

Years ago, I was responsible for supporting some shop floor automation for a small local aircraft manufacturer. Which included touch screen interfaces. Which some of the mechanics were in the habit of operating with whatever tool they had in hand.

As a hint, I developed (but never released into production) a UI that would randomly generate an animated crack originating from the touch point. Showed it to the boss on our development host. He chuckled.

The next day, a representative from the FAA stopped by to review the shop floor processes. I was asked to demonstrate the automation interface. So I went to the development terminal, brought up the factory interface and tapped an icon. A large crack appeared across the screen. The FAA rep chuckled.

Discord in the ranks: Lone Airman behind top-secret info leak on chat platform

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Reassigned

"Commanders previously suspended during the Teixeira investigation were permanently removed, and the entire 102nd ISR Group has been taken off mission and its duties reassigned."

Probably assigned to KP duty. In charge of peeling potatoes.

Microsoft floats bringing a text editor back to the CLI

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

First, it was Ukraine v Russia

Then Hamas v Israel. Now who went and re-ignited the editor war?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editor_war

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Corporations are groups of owners, associating together (constitutionally protected) for the purpose of conducting business. So that group (with First Amendment rights) may elect to have the officers of their corporations speak on their behalf as necessary to conduct business.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: All the more reason

We have something called "commercial speech". Which applies to speech or writing made on behalf of an entity intent on earning revenue and/or making a profit. It is less protected than individuals' free speech. And it takes the government's interests in regulating said entity into account.

So, it's off to the courts we go.

Systemd 255 is here with improved UKI support

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Everyone Hates systemd

''remembering the times people told him GUIs were "bloat" in the 1980s.''

Or another attack surface in 2001. It was the web management option of NT servers that allowed the Code Red virus to bring our companies data center operations to its knees. Given the option to manage these servers using the old fashioned command line options or "use our cool new web-based tool", many admins (and I use that term loosely) chose the latter. Not understanding that this would quietly start IIS in the background. Not knowing that this had happened, security updates for the web services were never applied. (It's not a web server. It's a file server/dbms server.) And then the virus hit all those unpatched systems.

I don't know how many layers of extra stuff I need to keep up to date just to keep the junior PFY admins happy with their GUI management tools. But it's not a trivial amount.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: /usr

"We do not need those historical splits any more."

Unless we want to take advantage of mounting certain parts of the file system read only. Or have to manage mounts from SAN systems, NFS, DBMS partitions or large file partitions in data center operations. I certainly don't need that for my laptop. But that isn't to say that some larger systems don't.

I find it odd that an outfit like RedHat would get behind this, given their user base. Or maybe not. Strip all the flexibility out of the Fedora consumer level distro and upsell the data center people the version which keeps all the options available.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

/usr

"banishing support for split and unmerged /usr directories"

I suppose it's inevitable that the single user/multi user booting distinctions will be going away. Because they are not needed on Poettering's laptop.

Law secretly drafted by ChatGPT makes it onto the books

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Passed as written

Or did they have to run the substitution script s/meat sack/taxpayer/ on the ChatGPT output?

Wayland takes the wheel as Red Hat bids farewell to X.org

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Wait! What?

I was under the impression that it had been deprecated years ago.

Red Hat, I mean.

Activist Investor Elliott calls for a management reboot at Crown Castle

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Activist investor

'One of those “we can sell the tower assets to a shell company and lease them back ..."'

But Crown Castle is one of those shell companies. There's only so many holding companies that you can stuff assets into like Matryoshka dolls before you end up with collateralization like 2008.

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

My 93 year old father did the same thing with his Mac (wireless mouse, no buttons, symmetrical shape). Look at the Apple icon and turn it the right way around.

US nuke reactor lab hit by 'gay furry hackers' demanding cat-human mutants

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

While I find ...

... this sort of hacking reprehensible, please put me on the list for one of those cat girls.

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: "Says who?"

"The dev teams"

Shame they couldn't include an option (install X or Wayland) and let the users decide. And then collect statistics or conduct a survey.

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

RPi

I am rather perplexed by Rasperry Pi's rather rapid jump to Wayland. These boards tend to get buried inside equipment with no local displays. Exporting their UI to a desktop (or browser) via X11 or a web server (depending on the statefullness demanded of the application). This is one of the strengths of X that will be missed on that platform.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Curious cougar

"a curious cougar apparently nosed around one of them without causing damage"

Not a 22 year old guy, so not interested. [Where's the Paris icon when we really need it?]

Bright spark techie knew the drill and used it to install a power line, but couldn't outsmart an odd electrician

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge
Holmes

"The next day the alarm company came asking who chopped their cables."

By which time the burglars had already cleaned the place out.

Downfall fallout: Intel knew AVX chips were insecure and did nothing, lawsuit claims

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Delusions

"SMBv1 is insecure, yet it was still included until 2014 in Windows 10 and used by healthcare°

Perhaps that is due to the fact that "healthcare" tends to have some older kit around, like MRI machines. Which were developed when SMBv1 was cutting edge tech. And which is eye-wateringly expensive to upgrade or replace.

Google, Amazon among big names in tech axing jobs this week

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

The only way ...

... you can protect your position in a company is to make sure that you will cost them more by being on the outside than within. Either provide a valuable service that will cost them an arm and a leg to purchase on the open market. Or have a copy of the bosses' answers to the Purity Test.

Oh, and make sure they know who is actually doing the work in their organization.

UK may demand tech world tell it about upcoming security features

Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

Re: Politicians

"What do they need these for?"

Collecting taxes?