Posts by Displacement Activity 440 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2008
Ubuntu 24.04 serverBirth: 2011-07-19
Well... that's the problem with 'birth', isn't it? You're running a distro which was released 13 months ago but the root directory was created 14 years ago. In those 14 years your computer has probably been power-cycled, restarted, and crashed a zillion times. You've probably even replaced the drive with an SSD and kept the same birth date. So the birth date isn't really of much value.
And loads of people in the other comments seem to be confusing it with uptime. I used to think I was doing well with an uptime of a couple of years, but nowadays I'm getting 2 or 3 weeks with security update restarts.
I am distrustful of AI but have been keeping an eye on Google's AI Overviews as I encounter them and was slowly being suckered into thinking it's not as bad as I had believed
I occasionally ask Physics questions, and I recently asked one about the meaning of a failure in a specific theorem (Bell's inequality). It gave a plausible summary, and then produced exactly the wrong conclusion. I think it got confused about the meaning of what was basically a double negative : a failure of an inequality. It had a choice of two answers, and picked the wrong one.
OTOH, I'm constantly typing in simple questions about software packages ("how do I generate an email invoice in Stripe" yesterday, and similar), and Google always chimes in with its own answer. And, most, of the time, they're so accurate that it makes my head spin. That particular one wasn't quite right because the software has changed since the AI learnt the answer, but it was a good start. You still have to read the proper hits, but I'm coming to the conclusion that the AI is actually very good with this sort of simple question, and undoubtedly better than most of the slop you find on the net.
"One of the things that we've noted is that you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name," he recounted, "and then when you get them on Zoom calls it's a military age male Asian who can't pronounce it."
I'm not quite sure how y'all gonna manage with this one. Many of us over here will still remember a famous Polish trade unionist who was apparently named "Lurch Wallesa".
MS want to be the only ones in town providing shitty AI code helpers (and not inconsequentially sucking up all your code to feed into its LLMs)
Ok... so now we know why it's a 'shitty AI code helper'. Second-rate devs feed their second-rate code into the LLM. Crap in, crap out. Karma.
The problem isn't that it "writes log entries as root by default" (anyone can write system log entries without being root); the problem is that it (a) runs as root, and (b) someone has been sloppy about munmap'ping null pointers. This shouldn't really be a problem, but the concern is that another program, which is not running as root, might somehow be able to take advantage of this, and get atop to run something on its behalf, in which case non-root program #2 owns the box.
The moral is that if you've got something you don't know about running in the background, and that program is running as root, and you have concerns about the code quality, then you should stop running that program. Seems fair, and RTFM doesn't really help in this case.
Oh, wait. It's just occurred to me that every time I run Task Manager I see hundreds of these things. Damn.
You're not going to like this. My Brother MFC is on the pseudo-DMZ (between the office firewall and the router firewall), and calls home, and updates itself, constantly.
Every 3 months I get invoiced - 1.9p (UK pence) mono, 12.4p colour. The toner turns up automatically in the post when it's low.
Why? Because I've spent 25-odd years buying lasers and laboriously calculating cost-per-page, and most of the time the cost was way above this (sometimes 18-20p). Life is way too short to be worrying about whether your toner is good enough, whether Brother's updating your firmware, sourcing another toner supplier, placing orders, counting pages, whatever. I've got better things to do. Not right now, obviously.
How do you distribute the one-time pad to whoever is supposed to get the message?
Quantum Crypto. That's pretty much the whole point of it; low-speed links are used for distributing keys, higher-speed ones for OTPs. Not a huge uptake, but BT has been running trials for years.
[note that this is entirely unrelated to post-Quantum Crypto, which has been in the news recently].
"The monitors at HUD are now showcasing the wins of the Trump administration," a spokesperson told The Register, "including action to lower the cost and expand the supply of affordable housing. We expect the media to cover these historic achievements with the same level of detail and immediacy as other frivolous stories."
I love it. Either this guy is a complete moron, or an evil genius.
Once upon a time, microcode was quite the fashion.
Pretty much everything was microcoded and bit-slice back in the 70s. I've just dug out my Varian 72 System Handbook (dated March 74; my first job in the 80s was working on a V72), and it had an option for a 'Writeable Control Store' (we didn't have one). The V72 instruction set was in the readable control store; if you had a writeable one you could write your own microcode to extend the instruction set.
I did a bit-slice processor in the mid-80s and wrote all the microcode for it, but that was about the time when custom silicon was becoming relatively cheap, so microcoding largely died out. Fast forward 10 years, though, and it was back in fashion, because it was too difficult to verify complex processors.
Microcode probably can't do that, such low level things like the add instruction are hardcoded.
Half right. Data-related microcode basically enables and configures connections between function units and to/from memory, loops when necessary, and so on, and the ALU/adder itself is "hard coded". However, you could decode a simple ADD instruction, for example, into two or more operations, and simply increment the result (I've done a lot of microcode for a (graphics) CPU, where a single blit/fill/draw/whatever instruction could turn into hundreds of operations).
You've missed the point. If you put the wrong numbers into the page table then it's game over.
I've done one device driver, which DMA'ed from hardware direct into user space. And, believe me, there are many, many ways you can fuck up without ever seeing a pointer. Rust would have exactly the same problem.
This may be a novel idea (spoiler alert, it isn't) but how about a search engine that just takes search terms with the usual operators of and, or and not, and gives the results that fit including the null result if nothing fits. Just like Altavista used to AFAICR.
Google did that for years. It was a long time ago, but I think that may have been one of the main reasons I switched from Altavista.
Anyway, they dropped it after a few years, at about the same time that they screwed over Usenet. It was a disaster for techies who had to do detailed textual searches for programming problems. The current syntax may have made them a lot of money, but it certainly did me no favours.
You don't need access to anything which is potentially encrypted. You interfere with the radio signals from the GPS satellites; either jam them or, if you're very clever, provide your own local ones. It's well-known that the Russians already jam GPS over the Baltic/Black Sea/Eastern Med/etc. It's hard to see how anyone in or around the Ukrainian border could get a GPS fix.
Not so sure about that. The Starlink satellites are travelling at about 17,000 mph. The drones are travelling at maybe 1% of that speed, in an arbitrary direction relative to the satellite it's currently talking to. Determining whether or not it's "moving at high speed" is non-trivial, and there's probably no engineering or commercial justification to even try it.
I don't know anything about Starlink but, even if the terminals have GPS receivers in them and transmit their position to the satellite, it would be trivial to forge that position. The Russians do that on a daily basis; just ask anyone travelling near Kaliningrad, for example.
I ran a small department in 83/84 that got CP/M running on my own Z80 hardware. It was a fantastic buzz when we got WordStar up (not to mention C and Fortran compilers). It really did feel like the world had changed at the time. IBM eventually screwed us, of course, because people still remembered who they were back then.
I've done a huge amount of hardware since then, from bit-slice to ASIC to quantum, but nothing really compared with that.
So who is "whoever"?.Is it the EU who demanded that MS keep the market open? Is it Crowdstrike who insusted that their product should include such drivers, but who clearly didn't fuzz test the data input? Is it the customer who chose MS and CS as their "joint" system vendors?
I'd have thought that's obvious. It's the customer, for not carrying out the due diligence to determine that their mission-critical system relied on a pile of amateur-level crock supplied by MS and CS. All this after-the-fact whining is just infantile.
And MS's attempt to pass the blame on to the EU is equally infantile. All the APIs in, for example, the Linux kernel are published. This doesn't make anything insecure. Security is an end-to-end process, and that process failed spectacularly here.
Burnt out in one specific area of the chip
This. The article pretty much confirms that this is the issue with the Intel chips when it says that the eventual failure rate is 100%; failures increase over time. The 4KW thing is a red herring. The actual die power consumption is a function of the frequency, voltage, and capacitance driven; chips like these are very carefully designed to power up specific sections only when required, and to limit the frequency and voltage to keep the die temperature to an acceptable level. The problem is that the tools which predict temperature distribution across the die are not very good, and you can never be sure whether or not the MB has adequate heatsinks, and you can never be entirely sure when silicon on a new process will fail. Eventually, some part of the chip will pop, unless you're very conservative. Microcode is going to be a very blunt instrument for controlling this.
Two of my VPS providers (FastHosts/Ionos) are doing exactly that right now. And it looks like exactly what I need - one of them tells me they'll be able to support full-custom images after the transition.
The statement "Migrating to new hypervisors – which Gartner terms "revirtualization" or virtual to virtual migration – is rated a tech that has reached peak hype as it is applicable to between five and twenty percent of organizations is simply peak bollocks. I dumped bare metal 5 years ago because VPS was way more cost-effective for me, and still is, as long as you don't do anything stupid like paying Broadcom.
Err … yes you do.https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/individual-rights/individual-rights/right-to-erasure/
It’s also a huge breach of UK/EU GDPR.
Err.. I think you might you have misundertstood. This is a tinpot information broker in Florida. It should be pretty obvious that there's nothing in US law that requires information brokers to find the country of origin of their data subjects, and then trawl through the laws of that country, and then decide whether or not they're bound by those laws. Because, of course, they're not. It should also be pretty obvious that GDPR is only relevant in very specific circumstances and places.
My first dev machine in my current employment (~1990/1) was a SPARC box, with a DAT drive. I've still got the tapes, but it would cost more than I've got to get any data off them. And the data has exactly zero value anyway. Still, it would be interesting - I've backed up stuff on USB sticks that was unreadable after 2 years.
Nowadays you'd use something lighter weight such as containers, etc.
I'm getting the impression that there are a lot of instances out there which are a single containerised app, running on an entire VM. So, basically, you start with 100 VMs, some dev decides it's too complicated to get the app running on "bare metal", so they dockerise/whatever it, then place that on the VM instead.
Missed that article; thanks. Note Marcus Baw's statement that "In fact I now strongly suspect that the reason we were getting any engagement at all at these levels was in order to strength NHSE negotiating position with Microsoft".
Almost right, I think. About 10 years ago I quoted for a Health Authority contract to write some straightforward software. This was advertised on a govt procurement website. Did a lot of work, got to the meeting, and discovered that the only other tender was from a bunch of no-hopers. The only problem was that this bunch of no-hopers had already written a lot of stuff for these people. It quickly became apparent that they had no intention of using an alternative supplier; they just needed to demonstrate that they'd put it out to tender. I never bothered with the NHS after that.
I read through 90+ posts looking for some insight into why previous Linux migrations had failed, and what the actual problems were. It was, of course, pointless: the only people who appear to have direct experience are massively downvoted, and the rest turned into the usual bunfight.
So what exactly are the problems? If the NHS, for example, could migrate, then Windows would be finished. El Reg: how about a poll? The top 50 issues that would stop your govt department/hospital/whatever migrating to Linux? That would give us something to work on.
My own non-government experience: I spend 90% of my working day on Linux. I started on Unix V7 back in the 80's, and have been through a large number of distributions since then. In about 2000 I started using Windows as a front-end, using xdmcp and then vnc to talk to my Linux boxes. This was because I never managed to find a usable Linux front-end, for various reasons: printing, Word and Excel equivalence, out-of-date browsers with limited update capability, and so on (Ok, some of this is a bit better now). My latest problem is that I've spent the last 2 years on an utterly useless Ubuntu GNOME desktop before giving up and switching to GNOME Classic. If I can't be persuaded to use a default Ubuntu desktop, then god help anyone trying to convert an entire govt department.
I'll call you an ancient 54503 scope (excellent, for 35 years ago), a ProLiant Gen8 (excellent, still going strong), a ProLiant Gen9 (pile of sh**e), and a ProLiant Gen10 (more of the aforementioned pile).
Never had any luck with HP printers. I wouldn't touch anything branded HP(E) with a bargepole now.
I'm currently on a Brother consumables contract, which is actually a great deal. About half of what I was paying historically buying stuff myself, and it's all automatic.
Also agreed, except that I have successfully used M4 standalone in the past. But this makes me think... I build everything from the ground up: C++, JavaScript, HTML, Bootstrap, jQuery if I have to, plain Makefiles, minimal dependencies. There's no way I would ever use a "framework", because there's no reason to. I'm constantly amazed that people are willing to buy into Node/Jakarta/CLI/etc ad infinitum simply because they're bright and shiny and solve some simple problem that has already been solved or could be solved again from first principles with a couple of days effort. 95% of what I see out there is just the old xkcd 15th solution.
Or maybe I'm just getting old and stupid. Time for a coffee and snooze.
Not great. But, OTOH, this is pretty much what you do anyway when you install other stuff; it's just more obvious here.
On the plus side, you could in principle download and check the script first. I've done that in the past but, to be frank, it's pointless, since it'll download other code anyway. Another not-so-obvious benefit: you would always do this as an unprivileged user (unless you're very dumb). In the Windows world, at least, I've been asked to install software as an admin.
The only actual downside is that the script isn't signed by anybody. But what exactly is the benefit of confirming that a script has been signed by someone you've never heard of? Or even someone you have heard of? I'm not installing stuff just because it was signed by Microsoft.
Besides, if you're running an LLM on your PC, installing untrusted software is not likely to be your biggest problem.
The problem is with the nutjobs that thought that joining an ink cartridge with a chip was a good idea in the first place.It's ink. It doesn't need a chip.
If you're taking about inkjet... it's not like dipping your quill in an inkpot. It actually does need a lot of electronics. You've got to generate small globs of ink. I don't know the physical details, but people are willing to pay me for the electronics, so I guess they know what they're doing.
Wouldn't touch HP with a bargepole but, actually, subscription can work incredibly well.
I'm self-employed and have been buying lasers for over 30 years. I've always been screwed on cartridges, so on my current Brother MFC-L3770CDW I get the supplies on subscription. I'm charged 0.124 GBP per colour page, and 0.019 B&W. The stuff just magically appears in the post when I need it (the printer's got to be online, and so is in the DMZ).
Before this, I was running on about 24p/page, for just the cartridge cost, for a 65/35 colour/BW split (my wife likes printing out web pages in colour). This would be 8.7p/page on the subscription, ie. a saving of over 60%, even before taking into account free drums/whatever. My total annual cost in now about £150+VAT.
On that 24p/page figure: I know it seems high, but I kept running totals for years. There were years when I was paying as little as 14p/page, with a small mix of 3rd-party cartridges, but I don't think I've seen less than 20p/page for several years now.
This particular mispleling first appeared on Usenet sometime in the late 1980s. Sadly, the gookids destroyed the DejaNews archive
That was an act of unforgivable vandalism. Some of the old comp.lang groups were priceless, and you could learn an obscure language quickly just by hanging around for a few months (that basically made my career). Stackoverflow is completey useless for these languages. I occasionally look for backups of some of the groups, but haven't found anything.
I have a free software with a few million downloads.
Ok, I've got to say it: in English, there is no such thing as "a software". It really grates reading this. Where has this usage come from? I never heard this until a few years ago. 'Software' is a mass/collective/uncountable noun. If you want to describe a single item of software, it's a 'program', 'application', or whatever.
I did a lot of work on the i860 back in the early 90's - boards, a kernel, and so on. This was at a time when a 40 or 50MHz processor was state-of-the-art. At the time, my view was that it was the first thing that Intel had got right since DRAM, and the 8080 and 8085. The 386 architecture was a disaster, and it only survived thanks to Microsoft.
The 860 wasn't a general-purpose processor, though - it was all about high-speed floating point, and you had to hand-write your assembler to get the most out of it. It was essentially targeted as a co-processor. It had almost zero competition - the DEC Alpha went nowhere, and Fujitsu's uVP never took off. They also cost me £1000 a shot in the early days, which didn't help. It was, incidentally, "VLIW", because of all the extra bits required to specify how to wire up the FPUs and datapaths.
I don't think it ever really died, though. I'm pretty sure a lot of the technology ended up in the Pentium. I think it was probably seen internally in Intel as a testbed for the Pentium, but I haven't seen this confirmed anywhere.
@Breakfast - good question. It's next to impossible to find useful information, and these comments are better than anything else I've found online. I had a simpler problem recently. I've been renting (one) server for years, for personal stuff. I now have an app that I need to roll out to a few hundred customers, who have very predictable, and low, CPU and traffic requirements, and who don't need particularly high availability. How do I handle this? Do I stick with renting servers, and put everyone on their own VM? Or do I roll out a cheap VPS for everybody? The only fairly obvious thing was that any solution with the word "cloud" in it wasn't appropriate and would work out way too expensive. I'm trying the VPS route, which seems to be working.
If you find out anything useful, you should post it somewhere. There's obviously a lot of interest.
Back in 2006 I flew from NZ to the UK, eastwards, with one stop in LA. They got us all off the plane, lined us up, fingerprinted and retina-scanned us (Ok, it was a long time ago, it might just have been one of the two), and then let us back on. WTF? Not even the Chinese did that. That's what you'd expect in Belarus, not the US. Land Of The Free, my arse.
Ok, if you're flying right now, it's a toss-up between a Russian missile and a Yankee anal probe. Difficult.
...is slightly different. Sites can use it simply for irritation value. You're thinking Ok, that's stupid, no site would want to irritate their own users. But a UK sports governing body does exactly this.
They have 25K+ users who frequently look up their own results ('PBs'). These are public information, which was supplied by the user's club to the governing body itself. 15+ years ago a number of clubs started scraping their own results to keep their local systems up to date. The governing body didn't like this and, without explanation, started rate-limiting, blocking IP addresses, and so on. Fast-forward 20 years, and every user now has to fill in a reCAPTCHA and then wait 5 seconds to get their PBs. All completely pointless, and without any basis in law. The reason is simply that (a) the website provider has a software product that they believe (incorrectly) fills this need, and (b) the governing body has an undisclosed financial relationship with that provider (until someone was forced to disclose it in a court case recently).
So, I've spent 15 years doing counter-measures, and waiting for the people involved to retire, be fired, or die. The sooner reCAPTCHA is finished off the better.
Red Hat then nuked CentOS as a viable option by making it not "the same as" RHEL, and my entirely unscientific observation is that Serious People departed for Ubuntu.
That's exactly what I did, 2+ years ago, when the storm clouds gathered (and what about the 'A bit of advance warning wouldn't have gome amiss' thread? Seriously?)
However, unlike the AC commentard, I can't agree that this is a good thing. Ubuntu's Ok, but it's not nearly as polished as RHEL. RH actually does something useful with all their money and employees, and I still use a free dev system for some tricky stuff. If I could develop on RH, and produce an RH-compatible image that I could deploy without paying RH more than my customers pay me, I'd change back in a flash.
I unfortunately had to spend several hours wading through the UK DPA 2018 and GDPR yesterday (Sunday), and there seems to be a bit of a hole here.
BICS appears to have collected call data through some sort of operation of exchanges. However, this is not necessarily in violation of GDPR, because the collected data, on the face of it, can not be associated with a real person. To get an identity, they would have needed information from the mobile operator.
So the mobile operator is the data controller (it possessed the private data, which was the caller identity), and BICS is simply a data processor. Transfer of data from a controller to a processor falls outside the data sharing code of conduct.
So the issue comes down to the contract between the mobile operators and BIC. I can't see any reason that the operators would give BIC the data unless they expected BIC to use that data, so the smoking gun appears to be at the operators.
IOW, maybe time to be kicking Vodafone, which sounds like a win.
By tacking extra restrictions onto the license Red Hat are violating the GPL
They're not doing that. If I legitimately owned, say, a shiny pebble, and gave it to you, and we entered into a contract which prevented you from giving anyone else that shiny pebble, your options would be pretty limited if you did want to give it away.
There no magic inscription that you can etch on to it that over-rides that contract. Unless, of course, it is magic.
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