* Posts by Sceptic Tank

1202 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2008

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The biggest microcode attack in our history is underway

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Trollface

Most worthless read ever?

Well, if I ever saw clickbait ...

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

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Trollface

Re: Random thoughts

This whole "only good for 10 writes" claim seems to be a bit unfounded. I did a bit of goooogling and the more trustworthy sources state that tapes can be rewritten indefinitely, although there will be a little bit of wear and tear. They should last up to 30 years. Tapes are chiefly damaged by incorrect handling or faulty recording equipment. This makes sense because there is little difference between playback and recording and the magnetic media could not care less how many times you changed the orientation of the magnetic field.

Copilot+ PCs? Customers just aren't buying it – yet

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Trollface

Oh wait! I must PAY €1,120 to take that laptop?

All this AI BS seems to me like we've reached the point where we have so much computing power and we simply don't know what to do with it. All the features have already been crammed into operating systems, office tools, CAD products, etc., so now we are attempting to branch out but have run out of ideas.

Microsoft makes sweet, sweet music with Windows MIDI Services

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Trollface

Move and break things fast

Updating .NET breaks the code. So much for backward compatibility. This is the reason why I abandoned ASP.NET Core Yadda after a very short time: I simply don't want to rewrite a great deal of the base code every time there's a .NET library update and some Bozo at Microsoft decided it's time to rework the code model yet again.

Eggheads crack the code for the perfect soft boil

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Trollface

Fire engines aren't always available in my area. I'll go for electric.

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Trollface

Re: Delia Smith recipe, modified

Ah ok. I assumed you are wheelchair-bound.

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Chinese torture

What, like Lego blocks in you underwear?

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Trollface

A cluck-up

Shelling the enemy?

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

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Trollface

Life in plastic is fantastic.

Somebody ordered a pink plastic Tesla. It was collected by Klaus Barbie.

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Trollface

Re: No new car models is the problem

Let me! Let me!

Saw one at a car show in ODESSA.

There's a button there to toggle Auto Pilot. It's marked AuSchwitz.

Engage the Auto Pilot and it takes you to Himmelfahrtstrasse.

And there was a kid who didn't look before crossing the street and the Tesla nearly Hitler Youth.

And if the car won't work in the snow they offer Winterhilfe.

In the Netherlands and Belgium the car is marketed under the brand Rommel.

Musk ordered a special Paul von Hindenburg edition but it crashed and burned.

Ok, I must get back to work now. Arbeit macht frei, and all that.

Mixing Rust and C in Linux likened to cancer by kernel maintainer

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Trollface

Seing some bad oxidation in the kernel, there

So instead of converting C to Rust, why don't you convert Rust to C? That way you can code your little program in a safe environment, make sure you're not hurting the little pointers, and send your contribution off as generated C. Let me go make room in the trophy cabinet for the 2025 Turing award.

Arm gives up on killing off Qualcomm's vital chip license

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Trollface

There's a gun in my hand and it's pointing at your head.

I'm clearly not the trusting kind. How do you go into business with someone like ARM when they can cancel the license for your core product at any time and basically sink your business overnight? You can't just jump over to something like RISC-V without a complete redesign of your products.

Early mornings, late evenings, weekends. Useless users always demand support

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Trollface

Re: Rarely

My equipment is so old that I might just use that line when somebody contacts me for support: "Gee, sorry boss, this laptop is so old it feels like I'm working at the museum".

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

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Trollface

I have to use Windows. Send over the St. Bernard with the brandy.

Windows XP had that stupid search dog in explorer. If you switched the search "assistant" off it showed you its rear end. I wondered if it was a subtle message from the development team for not wanting to use their juvenile search tool. I was actually just always happy to see the back of that thing after an XP install.

Poisoned Go programming language package lay undetected for 3 years

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Trollface

We all have our (programming language) problems

At least it's a memory safe language. Don't want to comment on the malware being there from this point on.

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

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Trollface

Re: If you decide to purchase the program in Year Two, you'll have to pay for Year One too

This whole thing looks like extortion to me. But on the other hand it could just be viewed as a targeted stupidity tax for those who still insist on using MS products.

Boeing, Boeing, burned: Over half a billion dollars by Starliner in 2024

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Trollface

Lift us down where we belong

If I were an astronaut stuck in the ISS with no way to get home, the next space walk I do would be to walk home. Doesn't look like this defunct company is going to have anything ready soon.

Oracle starts laying mines in JavaScript trademark battle

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Trollface

Re: Any day now...

When will there be a day again when someone does not have to bring Trump into a completely unrelated discussion?

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Trollface

Go lay your mines in the toilet.

So if I understand right it's illegal to call your business Oracle-anything? Even if it's not even remotely related to that red business and the stuff they flog? This is why lawyers and lawmakers should be beaten up regularly.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

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Trollface

The train is waiting attestation

Hehehe, here is me laughing in my beard about having to issue a microcode patch to patch up the faulty microcode and to my great astonishment I see that that is exactly what AMD did. I'm assuming that a power cycle reverts the CPU to it's factory state and either the BIOS or OS has to load the patches. So how can you trust such a device if your BIOS likely spends 70% of its initialisation time loading rootkits from NSA / Chinese Military / North Korea / Russia / Finland.

Ok, so I've never had a beard. Just happy in a strange way that I got the Intel CPU despite the challenges over there. I was kinda surprised that this type of attack took so long to happen.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

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Trollface

No more grasslands in the Sahara / Viking farmers in Greenland under threat

So now I wonder: did an ancient Akkadian read on the morning edition clay tablet about drought threatening collapse of civilisation in Mesopotamia and scientists blaming the disaster on the abundance of slaves slaving away at their tasks? In short: never you worry, climate change has been a thing since the earth began. I'd be much more concerned about all the pollution and devastation of the natural environment, but those don't attract many research grants and angry teenage schoolgirls. None of these "alternative energy" solutions are recyclable or sustainable – they just exist to channel money into the pockets of their suppliers. The only reason why we have it easy these days is because the weather has been pleasantly stable for 12,000 years.

Call of Duty studio co-founder pleads guilty to crashing drone into firefighting aircraft

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Trollface

He got hosed

"...first responders were risking their lives". That aircraft does not sound very safe. But why must California rely on Canada to come and pull the chestnuts out of the fire? FEMA still bankrupt?

Ransomware attack at New York blood services provider – donors turned away during shortage crisis

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Trollface

Effing leeches

"Limited information is known at present" ... that's what happens if your stuff is encrypted.

This must be a profitable business. I don't often hear of anybody getting prosecuted.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

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Trollface

Should have tested the wave forms.

"Are you a software pirate?"

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

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Trollface

Re: Per employee?

Well yes, duh, of course the janitorial staff! What if you have an Evil Maid who runs Java based malware on your equipment? Your organisation will be guilty of using unlicensed software.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

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Trollface

Astroid Catastrophe Monitoring Equipment

Asteroid Terrestrial Last Alert System. If you shoehorn those acronyms any harder there is going to be permanent damage.

Anyway, I'll re-read Lucifer's Hamner to see what should be done. Hiding out in the Sierra mountains IIRC and a gun to fend off canibals. But they are on the other side of the earth from where I am. No way I can get there unless I surf the tsunami over the Atlantic, through the Panama Canal, and up the west coast of America.

Intel sinks $19B into the red, kills Falcon Shores GPUs, delays Clearwater Forest Xeons

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Trollface

Sleepy Shores

Oh no! Halthaus stopped the project.

This is what happens when you become complacent. You saw that you're approaching the end of the line of what you can wring out of your core product. Competing technologies arose and techniques changed. And yet, even with all these MBAs sitting around, you could not come up with another product that people would actually want to buy? Kind of like at the place where Apple found themselves in the early 1990s. Nokia (in the old days) and 3M spring to mind as examples of companies that were able to adjust their business models radically. Apple survived with some cash from Microsoft; maybe AMD can come to Intel's rescue? Not sure if a bunch of accountants can devise a plan for new products to attract tech customers though. The tech graveyard is filled with once super successful companies that just wilted and died: Lotus, Borland, WordPerfect, DEC, Novell, ...

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

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Trollface

Re: Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra

INcome's TErrible, Lads!

Amazon sued for allegedly slurping sensitive data via advertising SDK

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Trollface

Meta Inc., my disciple through life.

Social media is a creep show, indeed. My dentist sent a WattsUp to ask if they can move my appointment to their other practice or set it up for another time. So I replied that they set up another time at the practice in my area because the other practice is quite far to drive. It wasn't 5 minutes after sending the message that I got a text advertisement for some estate agent doing free property evaluations in my area. What am I to do? I'm force-fed WattsUp because that is what everybody uses. If we all switched to Signal we'd have to contend with that weidro Marlinspike, but I doubt all our communications would be monitored for any scrap of information – however flimsy – that could be turned into an advertising opportunity. If these bozos started following somebody around and noting down everything their target did, the cops would soon bust them or they would be punched in the face. But somehow this antisocial behaviour is allowable online.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

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Trollface

Tiny Linux kernel – written in microcode.

I'm definitely no expert. But I find it strange that this isn't a solved problem. Disk drives have had PIO / DMA for ages now. I would have expected a NIC to have some cache memory for buffering and hook into DMA to keep the cache filled / empty depending on whether it's doing TX or RX and issue an interrupt when the kernel has to action something. Can't believe that polling is a thing in the year 2025. (Highly effcient sleep states and such).

But what do I know?

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Trollface

#pragma pack(0)

It's going to be mayhem if compilers start moving struct members around when calling a shared library that expects that struct to be organised in the way it appears in the header. Would make exposing APIs next to impossible.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

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Trollface

Lucky me

I'm not a gamer / digital artist / video editor so my computing interests aren't really dependent on any kind of GPU acceleration working. GCC will work regardless of what is drifting around in the nVidia driver cesspool. But yeah, mental note noted: don't buy anything nVidia during the upcoming hardware upgrade cycle.

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

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Trollface

I am not fluent in over 6 million forms of communication

Please remember before posting that the French translation bot is offline.

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Trollface

Re: This is not the time for sterile mockery that only serves to discourage the efforts of France

A merde-ocre attempt.

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

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Trollface

Your life's work is cactus

This seems to be an longstanding problem: bunch of brainiacs in ancient times had copies of their publications stored in the Great Library of Alexandra and some barbarian came along and sacked the place. Should have used clay tablets. Or you thought you had everything down in hieroglyphics and some fundamentalist comes along and bulldozes the place.

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

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Trollface

That's old

'Shut down' museum IT systems. Did he remove a vacuum tube?

At least they can grab an abacus from one of the displays and continue operations. Better than that theft from the Dutch museum.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

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Interleave at 9pm for the other office.

You're on the right track.

Mega UK datacenter greenlit, but we still don't know who's moving in

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Trollface

Re: If they've got a 400 MVA grid "reservation" then

AI is (apparently) going to put everybody out of a job so there won't be any need for 20,000 homes as everybody will be living in the homeless shelter.

WINE 10 is still not an emulator, but Windows apps won't know the difference

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Trollface

How well is Windows Recall supported?

A better Windows than Windows. Linux is doomed. DOOOMED!

(I tried to run WINE on a laptop with drivers from Nvidia. Oh my goodness! Was there now ever much lament. Apparently it works better with the open source drivers installed but I couldn't really come up with a use case to justify the effort. Initially I wanted to run the Foscam configuration software in Linux. But they are perfectly configurable if you don't mind using cURL and some PDF documentation).

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

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Trollface

You are the reason we have to lock everything down.

So I was working for this place in the 1990's. So after I got upgraded from a 386SX to an eggciting new Pentium-66 NEC thing (that did not have video drivers for whatever hardware they soldered onto the motherboard and it had to run in 16-colour VGA mode at dismal speed). So the new box shipped with WinNT 3.5 and Win95 had just been released. A friend outfitted me with a software of sorts that would make WinNT 3.5 look like Win95. As bad luck would have it, the PC rebooted with just blue background and a mouse cursor. Tech support chap investigated for a while, couldn't figure it out, and decided it would be be best to reinstall Windows because the thing wasn't very stable, etc. (I think I did admit to the guy eventually that I may or may not have installed some software that could have contributed to the OS instability).

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Trollface

Quit monkeying around.

Nobody to blame, but ... There was a huge project on the go at a previous employer in early 1990's. Everybody involved in the project got new PCs and the rest of us got their broken carp. So there I was, outfitted with my 386SX, running WFW 3.11 and some terminal emulation thing to connect to a Unsys A-Series painframe. One day the computer started working very strangely; it was as if the clock speed was halved. Pressing the Turbo button switched it into glacier mode. Tech support was able to verify the problem by running some advanced diagnostics and speed testing software that came free with DOS 6.2. It was called "GORILLA.BAS". After satisfying themselves that the exploding bananas were indeed flying somewhat sluggishly, even for a 386SX, I got a replacement (386SX) machine.

Why is Big Tech hellbent on making AI opt-out?

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Trollface

Welcome to Dachau. These are your options.

I wish they would focus on making their existing products a bit more stable before adding all this AI clutter an redesigning UI's to the point of being unusable. I'm typing this on a work laptop running Win10. Windows explorer is sitting unresponsive there now, grayed out and with a spinning wheel cursor. Probably some shell extension that has croaked, but this being a work asset that is locked down so completely that it won't read USB drives – let alone install anything on it – this must mean that something must have rotted with a previous OS update. Up-time has been 1h40m and now requires a reboot. Killing explorer does not help.

And give me the option back to specify the window border width. Effing measly 2px would do the trick so I can at least see where one terminal window starts if it is overlaid on another window. Now everything is black and if the text from both windows happen to align, it makes for confusing output. Even if you're just looking for the title bar to move the danged window around.

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Trollface

Re: Samsung

Stay away from Whirlpool.

Intel pitches modular PC designs to make repairs less painful

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Trollface

Re: Desktop vs Laptop

Maybe there should be motherboard form factor standards for laptops like we have with desktops (ATX, Mini ATX, Micro ATX, Mini ITX, etc,). Seeing that Moore's law is now all but defunct, maybe motherboard refurbishing can become a lucrative industry.

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Trollface

Re: Recycable

I'm not in the recycling business, bu there's probably not much of value to recycle on a PCB anyway: the chips are mostly plastic and silicon, which are worthless. You'd have to strip down an enormous mountain of PCBs for the copper / gold / tin to become somewhat valuable. Maybe all the chips need to be socketed so that the working ones can at least be recovered and reused easily.

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Trollface

Intel pitches business plan to make looking at the balance sheet less painful.

This Intel NUC that I have over there ☞ is still somewhat modular; I was able to upgrade the RAM and the M.2

NASA spacewalkers to swab the ISS for microbial life

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Trollface

Re: Who did they piss off at NASA?

"Hands up: who around here knows how to pilot a Starliner?"

...

"Ok. Butch you grab the brooms, Suni you get the buckets. There's some crud building up around the air vents that needs cleaning".

How to leave the submarine cable cutters all at sea – go Swedish

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Coat

Cable cutting deep dive

So maybe they should attach sea mines to the cables. Sail over the cable: no problem. Cut through the cable and the mines drift up and instant karma.

Searching for the Windows 3.1 install disks so I can play me some Minesweeper =========>

App stores unconvinced by Trump's TikTok ban pause, which may itself be on shaky legal ground

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FAIL

TikTokTakToe

The world can only be a better place if TikTok dies a horrible death.

TSMC pauses production after strong earthquake hits Taiwan

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Megaphone

Groundbreaking events that will shake up the industry.

Does this mean we're going into a phase of chip shortages again? One sometimes wonders if these shortages aren't sometimes engineered to strengthen the income statement. I recall the RAM shortage just when Windows 3.1 was becoming a thing.

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