Posts by Fred Goldstein

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Re: they really don't

.Linux on the desktop is largely used by developers; it's a good way to write code that will go onto a Linux server, whose customers will have no visibility into the OS behind the service. It's also used by recreational programmers and some uber-geeks who like to feel 31337 because they use it, and who remember all of the flaws in Windows 95 (when BSODs were still common) and imagine that later versions are just as unstable (they're not). It's a tool for self-esteem. But not a good desktop substitute for the mass market.

Miles of optical fiber crafted aboard ISS marks manufacturing first

Applying this to undersea cables would seem a bit expensive, never mind issues of amplification or repair. Someone once summarized the cost of building an undersea cable thusly: To cross the Atlantic, take $10 bills and line them up end to end. To cross the Pacific, use $100s. At $1000/meter per strand that raises the bar another big step.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Re: I need classic outlook

It dawned on me why SVD_NL thinks POP deletes everything. Which btw POP2 did, back before 1986.

The "free" Mail program that came with Windows 10 (I don't know about 11, I won't touch it as I have 10 almost stable) did not have the "leave mail on server" option at all. Download mail and it was gone from the server, period. No choice. Tottally awful design, junky program, but if that's your experience with POP3, then you will think it can't leave mail on server. There are many clients that can leave mail on server but leave it there forever. Good POP clients, even thunderbird (which was good before the v115 supernova explosion) offer "leave mail on server, delete after __ days". I use that to get mail on multiple machines.

Re: I need classic outlook

An archive is outside of the regular flow of work, where you put old stuff. Local folders which POP3 is built for handle that much better.

Theoretically IMAP can be used like POP; the actual protocol is a functional superset. However, nobody implements it that way. Outlook and Thunderbird treat it as a synchronized viewport on a corporate mail server, so the mail lives on the server and maybe you have a local copy. That doesn't work with ISPs. Nor with Yahoo, which now limits IMAP to seeing only the newest 10,000 messages, even though others can be seen via their webmail.

Microsoft wants to encourage keeping mail on their server so they can datamine it for your private content.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

Re: UNIX and particularly Linux attitude

A couple of decades ago, MEPIS Linux tried to build a community with a kinder and gentler feel. They may have admitted that for the most part, the problem with Linux geeks was that the bad 98% made the other 2% look bad.

Energy breakthrough needed to build AGI, says OpenAI boss Altman

Fusion using any of the models (all of them "let's imitate the sun") currently in development is a dead end whose main purpose is to keep physicists getting paid with grant money and dumb capital. Or as they say it's always 20 to 40 years away. Maybe there will be a breakthrough but I doubt it's in any system being developed now. This does however keep up demand for fossil fuels, as it takes away resoucres and physicists from potentially more productive approaches, whatever those may turn out to be.

Altman, however, is just an oligarch or oligarch-wannabee who lives in an artificial reality and should not be taken seriously except for his skill in building engines that do neat parlor tricks and hallucinate very well.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Re: We need more articles like this one

Here in the Colonies, we have a similar problem, albeit 51 times as widespread. Government contracting is not at all like private industry work. There is this idiotic idea that the "low bid" is the one to take; if a higher bidder is awarded, a lower bidder can tie up the project for years protesting. So the RFP has to be extremely detailed, and cover for all of the "known unknowns", meaning a lot of repetitive work just to be sure that the one case needed gets done. So it ends up costing far more than it should. Low bids are very expensive! But with all of the contractual rigamarole, most companies simply don't bother. So instead there is an industry of "Beltway bandits" who do almost nothing but government work, and usually do it badly. Each state, of course, has its won similar rules, and its own approved contractor list, while the best potential contractors wouldn't qualify, or wouldn't bother to try getting on the list. A lot of this goes back to the "Good Government" movement of the early XX, which was supposed to root out corruption, but merely moved it from blue collar to white collar and on a larger scale.

Microsoft touts migration to Windows 11 as painless, though wallets may disagree

Re: Pointless

The last three computers I've bought were available with Windows 11, but I specifically ordered the Windows 10 Pro version anyway. (Lenovo is good about that.) Windows 11 needs up front work to undo the UI borkage -- if I wanted a Mac all-pictures no-words dock, I might have bought one. And I've seen reports of driver borkage in 11 too. Sure it supports the most common configurations, but I work with multiple audio devices, some older, and it's bad enough in 10 without 11's new failure modes. Then I'd have to fight the telemetry, ads, etc., which I've been able to tame easily enough in 10.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

The OA board didn't know how to run a business, and frankly didn't know how to run a charity. One was from Effective Altruism, the same movement Sam Bankman-Fried belonged to. OA became a real business and needed pros to guide it as well as ethicists. They got neither.

This looks like Microsoft has the winning hand. They can hire the staff and rebuild whatever they need pretty quickly. The smart thing for the OA board would be to sell the whole company to Microsoft, which would become a semi-autonomous subsidiary, and to take the money to run a little non-business charity dealing independently with AI or whatever else they want to spend the money on.

Biden's facing the clock to veto Apple Watch import ban after ITC patent ruling

Re: Biden

Actual, non-alternative fact: Trump wears adult diapers. Also fact: Trump and his supporters are often projecting.

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

I used Usenet a lot in the 1980s; it was the main place for discussions on line, given that the Internet was still not open to the public but you could often still get to a UUCP server. Yes, it had some flame wars and spam, but there was still a lot of good content. The web killed it -- discussions moved to topical web sites. By the turn of the century I rarely visited. I still do sometimes look at a few groups via Eternal September using Thunderbird (which has a decent client), but mostly they're reposts from elsewhere. And some very disturbed people tying up some groups with maniacal strings of insults at each other, day in and day out.

But I did become a member of the Big-8 Management Board in the 2010s. Its job was to vet new-group proposals. (The alt.-hierarchy was, of course, not vetted.) During that time we got, oh, approximately, uh, oh yeah, ZERO new group proposals. We just squabbled among ourselves over some petty issues. Eventually Tristan & Co. volunteered to take over and we happily let them.

IBM says GenAI can convert that old COBOL code to Java for you

COBOL is a really easy language to learn and even easier to maintain, as they go, because it is verbose. No, not fashionable, and it assumed that the programmer was a touch typist, not a hunt-and-peck artists like the authors of C and Unix. COBOL also makes it easy to visualize dollars (or Euros or quid) and cents (or pence). It lets you put decimal points into a number that is *not* floating point, because that's how money works. So they should teach people COBOL, not try to translate it. I'm sure there's a fine COBOL compiler available for the POWER processor family, too. And probably a usable one for IA64.

Over 25 years ago my then employer was doing a joint venture with a big consulting company that hired thousands of kids out of college and sent them to its own boot camp, then assigned them to live for months at a client site. You know them. We heard about one of their projects, pre-Y2K by some years, to convert a program from COBOL to Java. They hired coders in India. They took each line of COBOL and turned it into some lines of Java. Theoretically it did the same thing, but in practice it ran a couple of orders of magnitude slower. Totally useless.

IBM sells off cloud business – yes, we mean Weather.com

Private Equity is where businesses go to die. Presumably IBM found that it wasn't profitable after all. So they dumped it on a PE (leveraged buyout) firm who will "improve efficiency" by firing much of the staff, especially the experienced but higher-paid ones who understand, say, weather. And who will engage in deeper surveillance with their app, which is a home screen widget on many phones. And they'll discover that they can save on computing by moving to a, uh, less-granular geographic and temporal model. So it won't be as accurate as NOAA, but they'll still be surveilling you via those Android apps.

SUSE to flip back into private ownership after just two-and-a-bit years

Re: It sounds like ...

De-listing and being fully controlled by a private equity firm is the opposite of being a private company in the normal sense. Private Equity is the latest euphemism for what used to be called leveraged buyout firms (LBOs). But leverage, as a euphemism for debt, became too well known, so now they call it PE. But it's really a small amount of equity and a lot of debt coming from places like sovereign wealth funds.

PE is where companies go to die. PE operators are financial engineers who by definition don't give a flying fleak about the companies they buy. They swoop in when the stock is low. Once in control, they pay themselves a huge fee (special dividend), sapping the company of any cash it might have left. They lay off huge amounts of the staff, and hope that revenue from old customers continues for a while even though there is little new work going on. The PE operators make sure to pay themselves huge consulting fees too out of the company coffers. Then they sell any saleable assets and shut the company's doors if nobody steps up to purchase it.

That's how modern capitalism works. Adam Smith would be aghast.

Middleweight champ MX Linux 23 delivers knockout punch

Re: this shoggoth of a startup daemon

> the code was horrible, ill structured and completely unreadable. The customers, however, loved it since it did exactly what they wanted, was easy to use and fast.

Oh, you use Window too?

Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Re: Great...

Speaking as a Windows user, I know this may seem a bit out of character, but this does seem to be an advantage for a lot of Linux applications, where it is more common to make source code available to be compiled with whatever options the target can use...

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

Some background: The article is wrong to talk about "ISPs" in general. A-CAM is a program offered only to legacy rural Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers that have been collecting subsidies from the Universal Service Fund. This is only given to companies whose cost of doing business is higher than they could sustain via their subscriber rates. They used to get a blank check and could spend upwards of $50k per house to connect fiber to the ranch, or could sit on old copper. A-CAM is based on a computer model of what it costs to string fiber to all of the houses in a small carrier's given geographic unit. So if they take it and do spend fiber, paid for by a 30%+ tax on everyone's interstate telecommunications services (a proportional take of phone bills, ISP services being exempt but leased lines paying full rate), then they have to offer 100/20. These are generally places that do not have cable, unless the (A-CAM) phone company offers it.

The US isn't like Blighty. We have huge rustic areas with extremely low population density, and the farmers and ranchers live on their farms and ranches, far from neighbors, not in villages. A-CAM carriers often serve the least-densely-populated 1% or less of the population, but they cover a lot of area. In some places stringing fiber is fairly cheap (plow into soft soil) but in others very costly.

Linux has nearly half of the desktop OS Linux market

Re: No, ChromeOS is not really Linux

I think folks missed the implicit snark tag..

No, ChromeOS is not really Linux

I know it's not Linux because DistroWatch doesn't follow it, along with the 92,368 (+/-) other distros that are *real* Linux. And, Linus not weighing in, they're the authority. Right?

Typo watch: 'Millions of emails' for US military sent to .ml addresses in error

Re: simple solution

It would make sense for the Pentagon to simply buy the equivalent .ml domains for a few hundred semolians. But it's the US government. So before they could do that, they'd need to commission a study (by a Beltway Bandit) on the topic. Then they'd need a multi-agency review. Then they'd need a study to hire a someone to write an RFP for a company to do the procurement of the domains from the registrar. Then that company would need to pay the few hundred dollars and collect a few tens of thousands in fees, maybe five years down the road. That's how Good Government works, after all.

Fortunately for the US, Russia's method is even worse. Everything just gets stolen.

Mali, however, knows that they don't need the current operator any more. After all, they work with Vagner, which also owns the Internet Research Agency. So they are obviously very good at Internet stuff and will be happy to manage misrouted US military mail.

Yahoo! comeback! continues! as! fresh! listing! planned!

Yahoo Groups still has some activity, I suppose.

Yahoo Mail has users who are stuck on it because their long-used addresses are there and it's holy hell to change email. But it has gone from bad to insanely awful. Their IMAP now limits you to 10,000 messages; all older ones disappear from IMAP and are removed from your mail client if it uses IMAP sync, which is alas the usual. The messages however remain on their server visible to the webmail, and their advertising harvesting no doubt, but that doesn't provide an easy way to go through thousands of pages' worth to locate stuff, just a rudimentary search function. The mail store also manages to break most POP clients. It sort of portends what Twitter might look like after a while with nobody left to maintain it either, though email is more important to most users.

Isn't their search just reselling Bing? The home page looks like a ladies' magazine, lots of gossip.

Europe's Euclid telescope launches to figure out dark energy, the universe, and everything

Re: Waiting for the paradigm shift

Yep. Dark matter and dark energy are the difference between the current mathematical models and the actual universe. They're real, in the sense that math errors are real. But you don't find them out in space, but in the assumptions going into your maths.

It's time to mark six decades of computer networking

Another hagiography of the ARPANET/IETF axis without acknowledging the true inventor of internetworking, Louis Pouzin. The original ARPANET was not an internet, just a packet-switched closed network. Internetworking means the ability to send information across multiple independent networks without their cooperation. That is, the internet's packets are the payload of an underlying network who doesn't care about the payload. Pouzin saw the early ARPANET and in 1972, at INRIA in France, developed Cyclades, an experimental true internet. A paper he wrote about it described the key aspect where it was layered on top of telecom networks. Metcalfe and Cerf leaned about this and in 1974 came up with The Transmission Control Protocol (IP split from TCP in 1978, in version 4), a bad interpretation of Pouzin's work. A change in French administrations, in favor of the post office (who opposed it), shut the Cyclades project down so it was largely forgotten.

Why you might want an email client in the era of webmail

Lordy Lordy save me from too many "improvements"! I have been using Thunderbird as my regular client for over a decade now and I have it well tamed. I cannot use a 3-window (Outlook-style) UI; the text is too small for me in that format. So T'bird lets me have the whole main pane for a nice single-line message list in one of my many folders, with each open message in its own window. I have a LOT of mail so single line works best. And I have a nice add-on (Expression Search) which makes the quick search more powerful and easier to use (like saying f:thereg to search the from field for the string thereg). I hope they don't break that AGAIN.

Syncing settings might be nice but it should not be tied to IMAP. I still use POP because I want to have my own permanent copies of my mail, and not leave it on somebody else's server. IMAP is a decent protocol but T'bird like most clients confuses the protocol with the corporate-mail use case where the mail lives on the server and the client is a view-port. For important stuff, only POP is safe, and that way I can delete it from the server after 60 days or whatever, giving everything time to sync. All you folks with IMAP into GMail are just letting Google have a BIG trove of your private mail to rummage through to sell to advertisers.

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Re: ...the people creating NT were poached from DEC

Cairo began long before XP. It was one of those classic vaporware projects, lots of rumors about what it would do, maybe in two years or so... and that was in the 1990s. After the whole thing ended, Windows XP came out, and that name was sometimes thought of as chi ro, not because it was Cairo but sort of as a tribute to the discontinued Cairo project.

I was at DEC when Cutler moved to Washington State. Rumor was that he wanted to sail on Puget Sound and Ken did not want to lose him. So they opened an office out there. I think they had him working on VAXELN, a real-time OS based on Pascal. He probably didn't like that, so Bill hired him. And NT has a lot of VMS ideas in it, which are mostly good. NT started going downhill when they moved the GDI into kernel space, to speed it up at the risk of stability.

In a stand against authoritarianism, Montana bans TikTok downloads

If they can ban Tik-Tok, they can ban anything -- newspapers, web sites, blogs, TheRegister, etc. That's crossing a bright line in America and even a Republican-dominated court is likely to strike it down as overreach. If they want to ban surveillance used by foreign governments, they can start with the number one violator, Facebook, whose entire business model is based on selling surveillance -- Prigozhin's Internet Research Agency is probably a big customer. Telegram, btw, is based in the United Arab Emirates; its owners fled Russia and took the company with them.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

Re: Good thinking that man

The actual rocket scientists at SpaceX wanted the water-drenched launch platform. Musk personally vetoed it after the parts were there, wanting to launch on 4/20. Because the pad had no water, the acoustic vibration of the boosters shattered the concrete and sent it flying for miles -- water would have dampened the sound and explosive force. It was very much an error. The Starship booster is a very low cost design but dependent on the very high cost launch pad, costlier than a standard one because it needs to support the whole rocket before liftoff and ideally catch it on return. That basically blew up. It may also have been flying debris from the pad that caused the engines that didn't ignite to fail, and possibly damage the control systems that led to the whole thing's spinning out of control. His "cheap, cheap, see what blows up" approach did not work well.

SpaceX does as well as it does because Musk is distracted by Tesla and other things and Shotwell can run interference between him and the actual rocket scientists. This time he got involved personally and it caused more failure than expected.

Rust Foundation so sorry for scaring the C out of you with trademark crackdown talk

Re: Trademark wars ?

They seem to want a trademark so that they can enforce conformance to their specification and deny use to unauthorized variants. But language variation happens all the time naturally, both in human-speak (natural language) and in computer languages. Witness the many changes to the once-simple BASIC language that Kemeny invented ca. 1964 and whose name lives on in the very different Visual Basic. They'd be better off simply saying that a program can only call itself compliant with, say, "Official Rust 23.2", and make that a trademark that users may choose to refer to.

Boffins concoct interference-busting radios

Re: What's the new part?

Yes, voltage-varied capacitors (varactors) built out of diodes go back a long time. In fact any old silicon diode, reverse biased so it doesn't conduct, has capacitance which varies with the bias frequency. That's the easiest way to generate FM in a good old analog oscillator circuit. I once took a silicon power diode and put it into an old tube-type variable frequency oscillator and it produced high fidelity FM. The "invention" in the article, though, looks more like switching between capacitors than varying their capacitance.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Re: Too much gold

It did. They mistakenly confused gold and silver for wealth, brought tons (literally) home from Mexico, and since the supply of goods and services in Spain did not rise in proportion to the amount of gold now in circulation, they had major inflation.

Re: BTC working well, Western Union angry

Salvadoran dictator Bukele wanted to attract Bitcoin-related businesses to his banana republic. He figured that lots of rich crypto-loving libertarians (basically, incel Republicans, probably close to BNP in Blighty terms) would set up shop there. They didn't.

Google staff asked to share desk space in latest cost purge

Re: whither all the Google real estate?

You'll note that the article mentioned locations around the United States that were not in the Bay area. So that is likely to be rented space.

Re: American Capitalism - Greed

American business school -- China's secret weapon. (In the 1980s they did wonders for Japan.)

Titanic mass grave site to be pillaged for NFTs

Re: immutable NFTs

I doubt even US courts would respect the NFTs, though copyright law itself might impact any original works of art, for instance, made out of ghoulish pictures. Well, Florida courts might, but copyright is a federal matter. So the value of the NFT is indeed local to the NFT true believers; anyone else who makes a copy can do what they wish, subject only to copyright.

The whole NFT thing reminds me of that Star Registry scam, where you could buy a gift that certified that they had named a star for you, but only on their registry, as the IAU ignored them.

Twitter tweaks third-party app rules to ban third-party apps

I saw a recent article about Twitter's layoffs. And associated lawsuits. It interviewed someone who led the group of about 200 engineers that ran the API program. The entire department had been laid off, including that manager, who was at Twitter because they had bought his company. So the new policy seems to go along with a total lack of anyone to support APIs any more.

Native Americans urge Apache Software Foundation to ditch name

A patchy server

Has anyone debunked the original story of how that name came about? It had nothing to do with Indians except for the pun. NCSA wrote a server back in the Mosaic days. It was open source. And as the web grew, the server got patched, and patched, and patched. So it became "a patchy" server, and hence Apache. Later the foundation was created to support it.

Crypto craziness craps out – and about time too

Re: Blockchain next..

Or, simply, there is nothing *legal* that a blockchain does that can't be done better without one.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Re: I nominate ...

Good choice. Carly's a real expert at running companies into the ground. With an ego almost enough to match Elon's.

Patch Tuesday update is causing some Windows 10 systems to blue screen

Re: ...aimed at fixing a problem with the Camera app

I wondered about that too. MS puts too much into kernel space. Of course so does Linux, so don't tell me to switch my desktops and laptops over, not that fat kernels matter from most user perspectives. Things like cameras shouldn't impact system stability. Nor sound, which has kernel drivers.

Re: Ploy to make you upgrade to Win 11

Windows 11 follows a fairly stable Windows 10. Since MS alternates between usable and garbage releases, 11 is likely to be like 8, Vista, and ME before it. I'll wait.

Windows Subsystem for Linux now packaged as a Microsoft Store app

Re: This is good IMHO

Yes, it would be nice. But I'm using Windows 10 Pro (I do not trust Windows 11 at all; they alternate between usable and junk releases, and 11 is like 8 and Vista, likely junk) and the Store does not offer WSL2 to me. It only offers command-line mode WSL. So either the article is premature or wrong.

Twitter is suffering from mad bro disease. Open thinking can build it back better

Re: Vote A.O.!!!

I thought Lewis Page wasn't writing here any more.

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Re: DisplayPort in 2003?

I'm pretty sure he meant DVI. I have a 2002-ish Dell monitor that worked great on my 2013-ish machine, with a DVI to HDMI adapter. But when I got a shiny new Windows 10 machine -- a lovely Lenovo SFF box -- it would not work reliably with the adapter, so I had to get a modern monitor. Which is much nicer anyway, and $150 buys a lot more monitor now than $300 did 20 years ago.

Intel sued over historic DEC chip site's future

The site is over 2 miles from the highway (I-495). DEC got the Commonwealth to build an access road (85C) leading from the highway to near the site. Since then the condos have gone up on either side of the property. So a warehouse/logistics operation would be sending a lot of traffic down the road and near the new housing.

DEC spent a lot of money on "Silicon Mountain". Chip fabs don't come cheap. They built the core of the plant on an isolated slab attached to bedrock far below, so no vibration from the roads or the rest of the building would be felt by the litho gear. Not cheap. But the fab itself, the equipment, only lasts a few years, and the room then needs renovation to get the dust count down to the ultra-pure level needed. Intel obviously decided not to bother. You'd think that with the chip business being pretty good, some fab company might pick up the site. But Amazon and probably XPO (PostDestructor DeJoy's company) are always hungry for places to run trucks to.

My town had a big site come on market recently, right on a major highway exit. Knowing that it was going to be available (a former car dealership), they quickly rezoned to allow industry, offices, labs, etc., but explicitly prohibiting warehousing. A nicer project is planned. Hudson may have left itself open, though. Logistics warehouses are not good neighbors.

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

Re: I'm not a nuclear physicist

IIRC both toothpaste and LFTRs (thorium cycle) use sodium fluoride. It is not that dangerous by itself. The hard part of the LFTR is that it needs regular decontamination via bubbling in gaseous fluorine. Thus the plant needs a fluorine generator. Not radioactive, but seriously nasty chemically. That is, of course, an engineering problem, and it is still only a recipe for local, short-term problems, not long-term radioactive contamination.

Conventional reactors need constant cooling, even after scram. Hence the concern at Zaporizhzhia, where the orcs are playing with something worse than fire, and have no comprehension of how dangerous it is.

I'm surprised your comment is getting so many negative votes. Current types of uranium-cycle reactor (PWR, BWR, etc.) do appear to be very much *net negative* in how much energy they create vs. how much goes into building them, running them, mining the fuel, refining the fuel, disposing of waste, and post-operation site cleanup. Molten salt designs may have a different equation, though anything with a uranium-based fuel cycle is highly suspect. Thorium avoids that.

I am not sure that the article actually refers to the LFTR thorium-cycle reactor, which I agree is a very promising design. The article actually seems to refer to a uranium-cycle molten-salt reactor. Like the LFTR it apparently doesn't go critical when it gets hot, and the reaction slows when the liquid salt drains, but its fuel cycle is still based on uranium and thus it has a lot of long-lasting isotopes in its waste. Not as much as the 1950s designs we have been using, but much more than an LFTR.

I suppose the advantage of the uranium cycle is that it creates a revenue stream for the uranium mining and refining ($$$) industry, like conventional fuel-rod reactors, while the LFTR burns thorium, which is a waste product of neodymium mining and refining and thus essentially free for the taking. And to the vulture capitalists, free fuel is bad; they are looking for revenue streams to tout to stock speculators, not to save the world.

Right. The SMR has the same problems as other boiling-water uranium-cycle reactors. It's your basic "Atoms for Peace" dual-use 1950s model repackaged as an SUV rather than with tail fins.

Japan taps industry to build safer, more secure nuclear energy future

Re: FINALLY!

Thorium breeders might please green weenies. They can't melt down, make much much less waste, and use a cheap fuel, albeit an expensive seed of U-234.