Posts by Norman Nescio

NASA builds for keeps: Voyager mission still going after 45 years

Re: Technology Perspective

...the constant vocal haranguing of the religion 'haters' who constantly try to promote religion as the root of all evil.

And there was me thinking it was a chap by the name of Phil Argyria.

Solaris is in maintenance mode – but Oracle added a significant feature anyway

Re: Before the bits run out

Just shows that they shouldn't meddle with things they don't understand.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Re: Heat engines

Expanded example, using a hair-dryer, not a toaster, but the principle is the same:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/35/

We tested all the Ubuntu remixes for resource usage so you don't have to

Article upvote

I wish I could upvote the article, and not just comments.

I want to do the same as others and say a big "Thank you" to Liam for this article. Good work, and very much part of the choice of things I like to see on El Reg.

Perhaps the article author(s) could place a first comment when the article is published that acts as a proxy for the article that commentators could vote up or down as they wish?

NN

Open source VideoLAN media player asks why it's blocked in India

Re: "vulnerable to DLL Hijacking"

Well, chances are the dubious warez site will also have the fitting dubious checksums, and if the original website is blocked, you have to take their word for it...

No. No, you don't. That is the point of digital signatures. You need to verify the signature against a public key, and I doubt the Indian government are blocking all public keyservers.

The checksum is for data integrity, the signature is for authentication - please do not confuse the two.

If you download software from a random server, the checksum will tell you if the copy you have locally is the same (to a high degree of probability) as the copy on the server. It says nothing about the provenance of what you have downloaded, which, as you say, could have been modified to be malicious,

The digital signature can only be generated by VideoLan using their private key (assuming they have kept it secure), so a warez site cannot sign a checksum with VideoLan's key. By checking the signature against VideoLans public key, you can be assured that the software you have downloaded is an authentic copy of what VideoLan produced. Or not.

Re: "vulnerable to DLL Hijacking"

obviously don't go downloading something calling itself VLC from any dubious warez websites, regardless of what OS you are running.

What about from non-dubious warez websites?

In theory, it can be downloaded from any source, so long as the download is sha256summed and the sha256 sum has a signature that verifies against a public key controlled and published by VideoLAN. (Other checksum algorithms are available)

Russian military uses Chinese drones and bots in combat, over manufacturers' protests

Casablanca

No doubt DJI and Unitree Robotics are "shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here their drones are being used for military purposes".

As other commentators have pointed out, avoidance of accusations of providing military assistance to Russia would be the priority here, whatever the truth might be.

Follow the supply chains/money to get to the truth.

Nuclear power is the climate superhero too nervous to wear its cape

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

...SpaceX the waste into the Sun

That takes rather a lot of energy. Anything launched from the Earth is naturally carrying the Earths orbital velocity around the sun, and to get it into the Sun, you need to remove that orbital velocity somehow. That requires 'delta-V'. A direct approach, using rockets to slow you down takes more energy that to leave the Solar System entirely,

You can improve matters by using an 'orbital slingshot' approach with various planets to modify the trajectory. Using Jupiter in this way, you can use less energy and achieve the objective faster.

Astronomy: Here's why we can't just rocket nuclear waste into the sun - Orbital mechanics, ruining your dreams for 13.5 billion years.

StackExchange: Space Exploration: Orbital Mechanics and Launching into the Sun

There are lots of links in the second link above that go into detail about getting 'stuff' to the Sun. Things don't 'spiral into the Sun' naturally - you have to actively shed velocity to do so.

Re: I lived when Chornobyl happend, I was 12 by that time. (Germany)

The Welsh hill farmers who couldn't sell their sheep/lambs because the ovines were too radioactive were badly affected, as were the farmers that had to pour away the milk produced by their cows.

BBC: 2012-03-12: Chernobyl sheep controls lifted in Wales and Cumbria

Br J Radiol. 1987 Dec;60(720):1147-58. doi: 10.1259/0007-1285-60-720-1147 : The Chernobyl reactor accident: the impact on the United Kingdom

Re: Double prices then double again.

Sure, go nuclear.

The levellised cost is 10 times that of wind, and more than hydrogen produced using abundant green energy.

1) Wind is intermittent. A very big benefit of nuclear power is the reliability, so that you can provide power at night in calm conditions.

2) The hydrogen economy is even more of a pipe dream than the very well tested nuclear technology. Storage of hydrogen is very, very difficult: while its energy density by mass is great, hydrogen is a gas, and liquifying it or storing under pressure takes a lot of infrastructure and energy.

Its also notorious for making metal pipes brittle. Using 'abundant' green power to make it is not a magic solution to meeting our energy needs, but could be a valuable contribution in combination with other sources, including nuclear power.

There's plenty of work going on on how to store generated power chemically: there's a group demonstrating low-temperature methanol synthesis, for example; and even a group that have demonstrated a route to making the equivalent of aviation fuel (at terrible efficiency). Methanol is far easier to handle than hydrogen.

I'm not against using excess renewable energy to manufacture a valuable (chemical) store of energy - it's a great additional part of the overall solution for moving away from over-exploitation of fossil fuels: but it is not going to replace the need for nuclear.

Lack of Uranium?

it seems there isn't enough current reactor technology Uranium you can economically mine based on current solutions to make a difference.

That's a result of the horribly inefficient fuel cycle used - deliberately - to minimise the opportunities for effective nuclear weapon proliferation.

Essentially, the current uranium use is a 'once-through' fuel cycle that uses a small proportion of the available uranium in the fuel. The reactor is designed to use the fuel inefficiently so that it is difficult to extract fissile material (plutonium and uranium) from the used fuel.

'Breeder' reactors use a high fast-neutron flux to 'breed' the isotopes of plutonium and uranium that are fissile (can be used to make bombs, or more fuel for reactors). Standard reactors are not breeder reactors, and countries that build fuel reprocessing facilities or breeder reactors are regarded as high-risk for nuclear weapon proliferation,

As a previous poster has pointed out, we have already mined enough uranium to keep reactors fuelled for a few decades, so long as it can be used in breeder reactors to make the specific isotopes useful for power generation. The unavoidable consequence of that is to make more plutonium, which is also perfectly usable as a reactor fuel, but can be used rather too easily to make bombs instead.

Current use of uranium is inefficient to help make nuclear weapons proliferation more difficult. In a climate emergency with a lack of electrical power, that risk assessment might change. Who is going to tell China not to build breeder reactors?

See also Wikipedia:(Nuclear) Fuel cycles/chains

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

...pumped-storage hydro-power projects (like Dinorwig).

Pumped storage is great for 'instant-on' demand fulfilment (actual spin-up time for Dinorwig is about 16 seconds), but suffers from a couple of problems:

1) There are not enough geological formations around suitable for pumped-storage to service future demand.

2) Variable level reservoirs are ecologically devastating. Dams on their own are not good, but adding in the frequently varying water levels means the 'intertidal zone' becomes a wasteland.

A minor issue is that the round-trip efficiency of pumped storage is roughly 75%, so you are 'throwing down the plughole' about a quarter of your expensively generated power as well.

Pumped storage is great for accommodating demand-spikes, reducing the need for idling power-stations, ready to be brought on stream if necessary, but they are not a magic solution to grid-scale storage. Lots of work is being done to use gravitational potential energy as a storage medium on smaller scales, but grid-scale storage is not a solved problem yet.

Microsoft's Secure Boot fix sends some PCs into BitLocker Recovery

Re: Yeah, even if they have one it may not work where the machine is.

DriveSnapshot works booted from an Windows install DVD/USB Stick. Just go to "recovery" and then the cmd prompt. Which lets you start drivesnapshot, and then you go on restore.

I must admit, it sounds great.

I get a little wary of web pages that start with

Create Disk Image Backups, While Running Windows

The Backup process will back up all your data into a single file, containing all data, including system data and registry, for total security, should your computer ever crash.

There is no restart (to DOS) necessary.

Ever.

(My bold and italics)

And follow later with

Complete Restore of a disk in case of Disaster

If a disk is restored to its original state, it will be exactly the same as at the time of Backup - byte for byte.

Restoring a system partition will require DOS; other drives can be restored using Windows

It's a little misleadingly worded. Not everyone will appreciate the subtle distinction between system data and system partition.

It almost certainly uses the Wikipedia:Shadow Copy service, which as Wikipedia points out, is not guaranteed to give you a consistent backup, although good attempts by using the 'writers' are made. I hope your applications are compliant.

[Note: assuring consistency of a snapshot when multiple files / databases are open which depend on updates being consistent across the set of files/databases require cooperation between the snapshot software and the application (or applications). Unless you know your applications do this cooperation, running a snapshot can be like playing Russian roulette with your data.]

The perfect crime – undone by the perfect email backups

Re: re: deleting data from backups

Eee, when I were a lad, many aeons ago (before GDPR), we did some backups to WORM drives. Not easy to delete some records from them.

As other posters point out, you can devise encryption schemes that allow you to 'forget' how to decrypt data keyed to an individual: assuming each individual has one or many unique IDs which have a list of encryption keys for the actual records linked to them, you 'simply' delete the list of keys, making all records inaccessible. The key management problems are not trivial.

To be honest, I quite like immutable records. I don't want, for example, details of my pension contributions to vanish into the ether; or indeed records of entry to the UK on HMT Empire Windrush. What I don't want is people using them for nefarious purposes: the right to delete is solving the wrong problem, when what you want is to be able to trust people not to abuse personal information. Gaol terms for people/directors of companies abusing that trust, rather than fines that can be written off as 'the cost of doing business' might get people taking things more seriously.

Re: Manager and Cashier

Many years ago, I took the view that living off the interest was too risky*. So I decided that you needed to be able to live off the interest of the interest. At that time, savings accounts were generating roughly 10% per annum, so I reckoned on £4million being about right. 10% of £4 million being £400,000, and 10% of £400,000 being £40,000. Since that calculation, inflation has meant the starting capital should now be roughly £12 million.

Unfortunately, I knew of no way I could get hold of the necessary amount (I am neither criminal- nor business-minded, nor play lotteries) so I've been a wage slave for longer than I'm comfortable with.

It is certainly possible to live comfortably on much less, but I set my sights on a reasonably luxurious lifestyle - not needing to work being the greatest luxury. Of course, morally, living off the sweat of other people's brows would make me a parasitical rent-seeker, so I try to assuage my moral shortcomings by supporting policies that help the Gini coefficient for both wealth and income approach zero.

*Essentially, by spending all the interest every year, you are eroding the value of the capital sum by the inflation rate each year (the real, inflation adjusted value goes down). At some point, that means the value of the interest is less than a comfortable annual income. That can happen surprisingly quickly. If you take the approach that the interest rate will approximate the inflation rate, then you preserve the real value of the capital sum each year, whilst 'creaming off' the interest on the interest. Eventually this strategy will fail, as interest rates lag inflation, but over a lifetime I reckoned that was a reasonable risk to take. If you have not lived with high inflation, you might not realise how nastily it bites. Of course, you can eat into your capital, but then you have to hope it lasts your lifetime.

Re: Heh. A classic.

It's not good practice, but I have had to pull out emails going back years from my personal PST archives answering queries about the precise details of the set up of multi-year high-value contracts.

As for why I had personal PST archives: the corporate email solution used centralised Exchange, with limited disk space. Auto deletion of email at the end of a retention period had been put in, mainly (as far as I could see) to control the huge amount of server storage being taken up by email. People were using it as a documentation archive. the official document management 'solutions' brought in over the years had all turned out to be uniformly dreadful, so people voted with their tried and battle tested approach: saving everything in email.

I pointed out (using the ingenious argument of a previous somewhat maverick manager) that the cost to the company of my time going through my old emails pulling out relevant documentation and putting into the umpteenth revision of the centralised document mismanagement system was far more that simply letting me store some PST files on some (suitably encrypted) USB drives. So this was allowed, while other colleagues cursed the email retention policy.

These days, corporate lawyers would put the kibosh on it: leaving potential evidence open to discovery is to be avoided. And GDPR regulations (if applicable) are clear on only keeping (personal) data as long as there is a good reason for it, and no longer. But my personal offline archive saved some corporate bacon on more than one occasion. I would certainly be a fan of a well-structured document/data management system with free text search (and regexes) but I must admit that going into my email archive and looking at all the emails to such-and-such a company in the specific time period leading up to contract signature, and emails to and from bid team members in the same period was very easy, and often enlightening. Internal emails also tended to be informative regarding why certain contentious clauses were written the way they were.

This was many years ago, and things are done differently now, often with good reason, but future historians will probably curse us for deleting the good stuff.

NN

I have had to re-educate certain users that used 'Deleted Items' as their archive. Years of email. They only came to me because they had run out of disk space!

RISC OS: 35-year-old original Arm operating system is alive and well

Re: Some features i would like today

In the 80es, it at times required black arts to get the letter ø displayed, or even worse, printed.

It still does. And still often doesn't work. Probably because some of the shiny new web-stuff has back-ends reliant on code from the 80s.

Back when the UK was more entangled with Europe than it currently is, many UK organisations had great difficulty in correctly addressing mail to foreign addresses with 'funny' characters in them. In Scandinavia, many people had to resort to the standard ASCII replacements of 'oe' for 'ø' and 'ö', 'ae' for 'æ' and 'ä', and 'aa' for 'å' , and in German-speaking locations 'ue' for 'ü'. You could use the correct character on a website profile, but whatever back-end printed the envelopes would at best leave a blank in place of the letter, or sometimes an inappropriate glyph.

It is less of an issue now, as many UK organisations reliant on legacy code for their core operations no longer do business with people outside the UK.

It's going to take a long time before UTF-8 is universal.

Unbelievably clever: Redbean 2 – a single-file web server that runs on six OSes

Re: εxεcµταblε is pronounced more like ‘echesmtable’

I find as I get older, using Listz for my Chopin is very helpful to stop me forgetting things.

AI's most convincing conversations are not what they seem

Re: 180 Turing

Irritatingly, that link times out. I did not realise it would. Sorry.

The official journal article is at Turing, A. M. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind, vol. 59, no. 236, 1950, pp. 433–60. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251299.

Re: 180 Turing

If no-one wants it for 'testing machines' can I use it to discern if a human is capable of having a convincing human conversation?

The 'Turing test', more accurately known as 'The Imitation Game' does precisely that, as the point of the exercise is for the (human) interrogator to determine which of two responders is the human one. That necessarily implies the human is capable of having a convincing human conversation; or at least, more convincing than the machine.

Original Paper, which is worth reading: A. M. Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49: 433-460.

Password recovery from beyond the grave

Legal issues

While the practical benefits of having a copy of passwords for role-based accounts are obvious, I'd be a little careful about using personal account passwords. For example, I'm not sure how banks would take it* if someone logged in to a personal account using the credentials of the deceased.

The processes and procedures around dealing with incapacitating illness** of and death of account holders is one thing that many organisations are very poor at.

*I'm pretty sure they'd take it badly.

**One of the snags many people don't realise with Lasting Power of Attorney (used to be "Enduring Power of Attorney" before October 01, 2007) is that it ceases on the death of the person giving the power to someone else (the donor).

Behind Big Tech's big privacy heist: Deliberate obfuscation

Re: GDPR insists on inmformed consent

As I indicated above "informed consent" is required if Consent is one of the lawful bases/conditions relied upon by the organisation - to use your example of a bank, it is highly likely a bank would rely upon Article 6(1)(b) "Performance of a Contract", 6(1)(c) "Legal Obligation" (e.g. for anti-money laundering checks), and 6(1)(f) "Legitimate Interests" (for their marketing activities). They may or may not also rely on Consent.

You are quite right to point out the other grounds possible for processing of personal data. A lot of people think that consent is always required.

However, people may get the wrong impression that 'legitimate interests' covers all marketing activities. If you read the ICO guidance, it is not as simple as that.

ICO: When can we rely on legitimate interests?

I believe there is significant overuse of the 'legitimate interests' ground, and would really like a test case to be brought. Failing that, an amendment to the law to make the legitimate interests ground a default 'object' (making it almost exactly the same as the consent ground) due to abuse.

Solution?

Just tax holding and processing data that meets the GDPR Article 4 definition of 'personal data' and 'processing'. Don't want to be taxed - then don't process the data of individuals of the relevant jurisdiction. Have a higher rate for offshore processing.

GDPR Article 4:

For the purposes of this Regulation:

(1) ‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;

(2) ‘processing’ means any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction;

It produces a revenue stream for the government, and since it costs the companies money, will act as an incentive to minimise use of personal data. Would also provide job opportunities for auditors to check how much personal data was being processed, funded by the extra taxes generated from miscreants who under-report their processing.The auditors could also check that the correct grounds for processing are being used for processing. Throw in a 'de minimis' exception for individuals, and we are good to go.

Could even be a good replacement for fuel duty.

Makers of ad blockers and browser privacy extensions fear the end is near

Revolution?

Given the immense complexity of current browsers, which translates into a lack of control over the features by ordinary folks/programmers, as only very well-funded (either by money or 'free' time) development teams can work on them, the time might be right for a revolution in practice and for a simpler approach to become more popular.

I'm thinking of something like the Gemini protocol

The design is deliberately not easily extensible, in order to preserve one of the project's stated goals of simplicity.

I'm not saying the Gemini protocol is the solution; but something like it might be, with a design 'baked-in' to make it difficult to take over in the way that browsers have been.

The browser 'market' is horribly skewed by Alphabet/Google. Just like Microsoft did, they define the 'standard browser', and you get what suits Google to offer. It's not a good situation, but I don't know how it can be effectively remedied on a long-term basis.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: Opaque

Pollocks to this. The sole reason for all these puns is to skate around the topic in the hope that people will clam up before the truth is winkled out. If it doesn't stop, I'll get crabby.

Re: Da Future!

Given that nuclear reactors are pretty much sophisticated kettles, producing steam to power turbine-generators, yes, it is a steam age.

Re: Why the HELL Nuclear

Waste Management Febriary 2017: Wind turbine blade waste in 2050

"The research indicates that there will be 43 million tonnes of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40% of the waste, Europe 25%, the United States 16% and the rest of the world 19%."

Currently wind turbine blades are difficult to recycle. That's a lot of land-fill.

Re: even more safer to operate?

VoiceOfTruth said:

Lots of stupid people out there.

Actually, shorn of context, you've managed to make a true statement there. Well done!

Now try a little introspection.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

Re: Everybody knows...

The menu system on those old Nokias was good. Each item was numbered, so you could find options just by going down the tree (I wouldn't be surprised if someone was inspired by SNMP Object Identifiers (OIDs)).

Remembering the path to walk through the menus to get to the language choice wasn't difficult, but if in doubt, the phone were so popular, you could be pretty sure someone in the vicinity would have one, so you could walk through the English menus on their phone while doing the same on your phone set to Finnish or Turkish and sort it out that way.

The simple, clear, and predictable menu system was also a boon for people with sight impediments: a good example of how things should be done.

Re: Easy to miss something trivial

Perhaps the instructions could have said "Ctrl with C", or even "Ctrl and C simultaneously". Many people interpret the instructions "Do A and B" as do A followed by B, for example "Shampoo and set", "Cut and cover", "Out and Return", "Pay and Display", "Dinner and Dance", or even the three S's "Shower, Shit and a Shave", which would be messy if done simultaneously.

Engineer sues Amazon for not covering work-from-home internet, electricity bills

In Norway, tax deductions are available for commuting to work.

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/person/taxes/get-the-taxes-right/employment-benefits-and-pensions/travel-home-work/travel-deduction/

Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave

The word is shrank.

Not if you speak the USAian version of English.

Past of dive is dove, not dived.

Past of drag is drug, not dragged

Past of fit is fit, not fitted

Past of sneak is snuck, not sneaked

Past of shrink is shrunk, not shrank

They like their irregular verbs.

Re: Allow me to warm up a bag of microwave popcorn...

Resistance is useless!

Elon Musk orders Tesla execs back to the office

Re: Ego Musk

I had the same thoughts as you, until I looked at this website. There's a few BEV vehicles that can tow:

New Electric Tow Cars List – Updated April 2022

Volkswagen ID.4/Skoda Enyaq

Hyundai IONIQ5/KIA EV6

Assorted BMWs, Audi's, Mercedes

Renault Megane E-tech

Perl Steering Council lays out a backwards compatible future for Perl 7

Re: Backwards compatibility

This is good advice. Rolling your own time functions is fraught with elephant traps:

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

Asking for the ability to process *any* date programmatically is a 'bit of a stretch'.

Making <time> safe for historians>

Assumptions about time and clocks is a rich source of obscure errors and gotchas.

How to explain what an API is – and why they matter

Re: The Car Building Analogy is Flawed

Traditionally everything British used everything Lucas had to offer, but that’s a period best kept in the dark.

If you were using Lucas for lighting, that was not difficult!

https://mossmotoring.com/prince-darkness-joseph-lucas/

APIs have been around since the dawn of computing

They are just a documented way of handling the arguments in a subroutine call.

What's new-ish is the ability to run subroutine calls across a public network*, where you don't necessarily have ownership or control of the far end, and potentially paying for the privilege. This enables monetisation of (micro-)services, and a network effect of many people using the same API operating on common shared data. A bit like one fax machine being useless, two being of limited utility, but connect fax machines to a public telephone network and you suddenly have a new way of sending information around.

*Remote procedure calls have been around since the early 80s, and were an academic curiosity before then. New-ish in the history of computing. Possibly just discovered by Marketing?

Beijing needs the ability to 'destroy' Starlink, say Chinese researchers

Re: On a more serious note....

What have somnolent Equi africanus asinus go to do with the price of fish?

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Re: LibreOffice, for example, is every bit as good as Microsoft Office

To be fair, I've just had to compile a driver for a WiFi PCI card - the Realtek 8821CE - from source.

Luckily, Ubuntu kindly packaged it up as a .deb file, so it wasn't particularly onerous.

Disabling 'Secure Boot' so I could install it, however...

The sad state of Linux desktop diversity: 21 environments, just 2 designs

Re: The curse of overchoice

Asking for enlightenment here: why not use a Windows PE image to check that everything works? That doesn't take an hour.

From a Linux perspective, booting a live image off a USB flash memory thumb drive lets me check that everything works for Linux, and I can customise that image. I have a WinPE flash memory thumb drive that allows me to to firmware updates on PCs where the manufacturer doesn't provide a Linux-friendly firmware update mechanism.

It is entirely possible that I am missing something obvious here.

When I was doing Win10 installs (not just testing) on refurbished laptops, I was doing a lot more than one an hour - I couldn't swear to it, but 15-20 minutes sounds possible. I had a set of installation USB drives, and had several running simultaneously, each at different stages of the install.

OpenVMS on x86-64 reaches production status with v9.2

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

It seems now that IT is full of people glueing together pieces of code with sticky tape and pushing it out to production with the threshold of pushing it out being as low as 'it works'

It's the concept of 'Minimal Viable Product', sadly approached from below. Often found in concert with the 'Minimal Marketable Product'.

Roman Pichler, 9th October 2013: The Minimum Viable Product and the Minimal Marketable Product

Re: I wonder how many people still remember how to use it?

As a means of querying arbitrary data in structured files, DATATRIEVE was really quite neat. I never used the plotting routines (PLOT WOMBAT anyone?), but for querying what were quite large files for the time, it was very useful tool for me.

Microfiche

Shame it isn't open-source

We had the BLISS/Macro32 source on microfiche, and it came if very handy debugging obscure problems.

Corroboration here: https://www.osnews.com/story/27871/hp-gives-openvms-new-life/

So while you couldn't modify and distribute the source, it was available for inspection, and jolly useful it was too.

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: NTFS-3G

Sounds like the author had not heard of NTFS-3G, which has worked pretty problem-free* for years. Mounting, reading and writing NTFS works just fine**, and it comes with all major distros. OK, it is a FUSE-based system, but that is transparent to users, and the performance is quite OK**, unless you for some reason want to use it as your main FS (and why would one want to do that on a Linux system?).

*For values of 'problem-free' less than 100%

**For values of 'just fine' less than 100%

***For values of OK less than 100%

NTFS-3G is by no means problem-free. There are, for example, NTFS on-disk structures it cannot cope with - for examples, see the manual regarding other types of reparse points. (It's also worth reading the NTFS-3G FAQ for gotchas) Effectively, NTFS is still a moving target.

For many people, NTFS-3G is 'just good enough', if, for example, you are rescuing some files, or transferring a limited number from one system to another; but as the open-source writers are not the maintainers of the original, they can always be caught out,

As for performance, it's FUSE. I did an backup rsync by mistake from a Linux system to an external NTFS drive. Slow as molasses. Certainly not good at creating the myriads of files. Having stopped it and used ext4 instead, things were far faster. This is not to say NTFS-3G as the target filesystem was unusable, just considerably slower.

I am very glad NTFS-3G exists. It has allowed me to help out friends in need many times, and I am very grateful to the stalwart developers and maintainers: theirs is an unenviable and unending task. For certain use-cases, if you live within its limitations, it is great, and certainly a wonderful addition to my toolbox. However, it is not an officially blessed driver from Microsoft, with all the consequences that entails.

Thinnet cables are no match for director's morning workout

Re: Full names please.......

I hear that Isobel would be the standard spelling.

Google Docs crashed when fed 'And. And. And. And. And.'

Re: Absurd

Then turn off grammar checking, and you'll never have to see it.

You're welcome.

Shirley that should of been: "Your welcome?".

After historic win, Amazon workers at another NYC warehouse reject unionization

Re: Oh the humanity...

In the best case, a union is like have a legal team and HR department on your side, not the company's. It is a small step to redressing the imbalance in power between the employer and employee.

In the worst case, industry-specific unions have union employees and a dysfunctional internal power/management structure that can reflect the worst of companies, and lead to the union member having little, if any representation of their individual case, and little to no choice over union policies.

Where a union is on the spectrum between best and worst case can vary considerably.

The worst American union practices are illustrated by believable stories of people not being allowed to change light-bulbs as that's a union electrician's job. It doesn't matter if it is true or not, the belief is enough to give (sensible) unions a bad name. (Much like the 'Spanish practices' of Fleet Street, as was).

Given Germany manages to have a successful economy, while having good worker conditions and involvement in company administration, I'd say there is room for improvement, both the the USA and the UK.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

Metaverse Avatars

When Skype for Business was inflicted on us many, many moons ago, I discovered that the avatars could be animated GIFS. It wasn't long before all the techies had personalised animations, some quite clever. HR soon put a stop to it, requiring boring corporate photographs.

Metaverse avatars could be anything. Attend your meeting as 7of9, a furry, Arnie, a rendition of Munch's The Scream, a Barney, and so on. I expect HR will put a stop to having fun and require consistency and a resemblance to your real-life appearance.

On the other hand, a hacked client could put any appearance you liked on other participants as experienced by you, which could be fun, and maybe distracting.

Dropbox unplugged its own datacenter – and things went better than expected

Re: Corporate objective?

None of the denizens of the C-suite will be at HQ - they will all be remote-working from ski-cabins in Colorado, beach 'huts' in Hawai'i and the like.

In fact, this gives an excellent justification for remote working - if you cluster all your essential people in a single building, all it takes is a comic-book meteorite to wipe them all out in one swell FOOP! (Roy Lichtenstein eat your heart out.) and your business is gone. If everyone is working from home, then your business continuity problems are far smaller.

(Off to write business case for permanent home-working for DR/BCP purposes.)