Posts by Fred Goldstein

You can now pepper your Windows 10 desktop with Android apps... if you have a Samsung phone, that is

I installed YourPhoneCompanion and discovered that ti Does Not Work. It once connected and downloaded some texts to the PC. In August. Since then it hangs. It also seems to want to connect to an account name that is one of my emails but not the one my Microsoft Account is on. The app on both ends is so stupid that it has no login -- once it infers from somewhere what account to use, it uses it, and if the phone and PC don't match, tough noogies -- why do you have more than one address when you could do everything on live.com (or gmail, which it's a bad coy of) and let them mine your work mail for advertisers? What incompetence.

Touchscreen holdout? This F(x)tec Pro1 X phone with sliding QWERTY keyboard might push your buttons

Re: It sucks to be old.

Exactly. I'm not blind, just impaired, and have limited hand-eye coordination, so a touch screen doesn't work for me either, though I can play Candy Crush on my Blackberry and only sometimes move the wrong piece. The little BB keyboard is hard enough, but touch screens produce too many errors. Swype is totally hostile, sorta like cursive, which I can't do to save my life. I'm hoping the FxTec or something like it becomes available in the US for the Verizon network. The market seems to be aimed 100% at the fully-sighed well-coordinated 18-39 set. There are plenty of customers for niche markets like physical keyboards.

I can't find a detachable phone keyboard on the market any more. One was built for a specific model of Samsung a few years ago, and for a specific iPhone some years ago, but a generic one (Bluetooth could connect it) even in a folding-case format doesn't seem to be available any more. If you find one let me know,. The Cult of St. Steve the Calligrapher has hurt the market.

Meet the ‘DPU’ – accelerated network cards designed to go where CPUs and GPUs are too valuable to waste

Calling this a DPU is ridiculous. A main CPU is a data processing unit. This is an I/O processor, not a data processor. It takes one or more communications channels and handles their I/O processing. They handle blocks of data, multiplexed, typically, via the IP header (which is just a mux header anyway), so let's call this a block multiplexor channel. And since it's a processor, its API consists of calling programs that run on it, so let's call the API Execute Channel Program, EXCP. Heck, you could offload disks onto these too; it's not as if they were lame little byte multiplexors, though one might make the argument that a packet is just serial bytes and thus that's a better name.

Maybe this is such a great idea that IBM should acquire Marvell too. A great fit for those Power10 processors that support persistent memory, meaning mass storage devices that are directly addressed by byte, not needing a file system.

//JOB

LibreOffice community protests at promotion of paid-for editions, board says: 'LibreOffice will always be free software'

Libre in the name means about as much as Democratic People's Republic of Korea, which is of course not what its name implies.

Re: @LDS - "Software can be open source, but you have to pay to use it"

DEC had a version of that too. VMS source code could be obtained, but it came on microfiche, not machine readable. And use licenses remained in effect. But you could see the sources if you needed to, mainly to help develop drivers.The term for it is "disclosed source".

Re: What's the need?

How about dropping one letter and having Lire Office? Reminiscent of old Italian money, Italian for pounds.

Re: "Doing a reverse takeover of IBM"

No, reverse takeover seems more appropriate, given that within IBM, the Red Hat profits are growing while other sectors' profits are shrinking. Red Hat's model -- it's free to use, but support is a product -- works well for them. After all, compare it to Microsoft, where you pay for the product and support is, uh, what?

LibreOffice slips out another 7.0 beta: Spreadsheets close gap with Excel while macOS users treated to new icons

Compatibility. Everybody exchanges Word docs. LO comes close but risks breaking non-trivial things.

And for some users, Access. It's old and limited, but what it does it does well. LO has no usable database program, just a bad joke called Base which chokes on anything more than a teetotaler's wine list.

But Calc is pretty good, and Excel 2019/365 just sucks wind big time, buggier than hell. I am starting to convert things over to it just because it works and Excel often doesn't any more.

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Yes, Barnum became mayor of Bridgeport, the largest city in Connecticut. That showed much more competence than Trump.

Tech's Volkswagen moment? Trend Micro accused of cheating Microsoft driver QA by detecting test suite

Re: Petty or Pedant?

I used to have a role of duck tape and a roll of gaffer tape, and the gaffer tape was a whole lot better. Way too good for the average consumer.

Manco,in the US, may claim a duck as a trademark, but the tape may have been made from "cotton duck" material, and it is lousy for ducts, so duck tape seems reasonable.

Could it be? Really? The Year of Linux on the Desktop is almost here, and it's... Windows-shaped?

Re: If only!

I turned off the telemetry service in my Windows desktop system. To be sure, I stick to the Pro version, which gives more control than the lame Home version. But a lot of hard-core Linux lovers seem to confuse Windows 7 and 10 with, say, Windows ME or Vista, which were unstable messes. The Windows NT kernel is not bad, even if overloaded with things that should have been in userland (also true of Linux).

Ofcom measured UK's 5G radiation and found that, no, it won't give you cancer

Re: Giga HURTS, people

Well, there is a way for a 5G mast to kill people. If not properly secured and someone climbs high enough and falls off of it, that can be quite fatal. Professional tower climbers have safety belts and harnesses.

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Credit to Intel, though. One of its susidiaries, McAfee, calls out how a product from another, MobilEye, misbehaves.

The BlackBerry in your junk drawer is now a collectors' item: TCL says no more new keyboard-clad phones

Re: Boo Hoo :.(

There have been some rumors on Crackberry that Blackberry may reenter the hardware business. Which presumably means hiring a contract manufacturer. That would be nice. I use a KeyONE and it's very good, but Verizon stopped supporting it a year ago, so there have been no firmware updates, not even security fixes. KeyTwo doesn't have CDMA. While Verizon no longer accepts CDMA-only non-LTE phones, its CDMA network is still running, and in many locations, especially indoors, only CDMA works.

FCC lines up $16 billion for broadband across entire US. Well, except New York because, screw them, right?

Or a simpler, if less dramatic, explanation...

New York got $170M in lieu of participation in CAF II. That was more than it would have gotten had it stayed in. The state program was supposed to reach everywhere. So if it is being followed then there is literally no need for RDOF (CAF III) in NY. RDOF reaches areas that did not get picked up in CAF II and places that are not 25/3. The NY program was supposed to exceed 25/3 everywhere, so again no place in state should be eligible.

Protestors in Los Angeles force ICANN board out of hiding over .org sale – for a brief moment, at least

Re: There is no government mandate

This is a typical response by those who don't actually undertand how the Internet or ICANN works, and assume the worst when there is nothing to it.

.org was created as the miscellaneous category, for things that weren't .net or.com, and the vast majority of them are not non-profits. As a registry, they charge registrars a wholesale price, under $10/year, for each entry. You can renew for up to 10 years at the current rate, so if your organization is really paranoid, then pay <$100 for a decade. But since 90%+ of .orgs are just random folks, it would be terrible business to raise the price much and lose them to the many other domains. So they won't.

Also, neither ICANN nor ISOC nor a registry has "legal" authority, the way the FCC and ITU own phone numbers. If the registry really screwed up, someone could legally fork it and tell DNS servers to choose their alternative .org root. Nobody wants that nuclear option to happen but it could.

Stack Overflow makes peace with ousted moderator, wants to start New Year with 2020 vision on codes of conduct

Re: They

You is describing the neologistic use which leads to the singular use of "they". It not be regular English grammar, however, to say that there am no plural any more. They dost be a plural form, and using it to refer to a specific person is still grammatically plural, and uses plural verb forms. English hast plural pronouns, whether though preferrest it or not. It be singular ones you have a problem with.

<back to normal English>

"You" is a plural pronoun long relegated to singular use in English. It accompanies plural verb forms even when used to refer to one person. So while John goes to the store, you (individual) go to the store and all ten of you (y'all, in southern, or youse in Rhode Islandish) go to the store too. If someone doesn't want to be a "he" or "she", then he may want to be a "they", and thus always plural

Smart speaker maker Sonos takes heat for deliberately bricking older kit with 'Trade Up' plan

I still have a pair of B&W loudspeakers from 1982. They work fine. I don't get this active-speaker crap. A speaker is a device that converts electricity into sound. That can last quite a while, though some speaker cones do dry out and fail over time.So the smart thing is to separate the long-life stuff (speakers), the medium-life stuff (amplfiers, whose components, especially electrolytic capacitors, can fail within a couple of decades), and the short-life stuff (digital electronics, which become obsolete rapidly and generally require factory updates, which don't keep coming). Sonos-type boxes blend all three and thus are a bad deal.

I have a 3-piece set of Cambridge Soundworks (later bought by Creative) computer speakers. One channel's amp failed. So I got a cheap amp for the speakers and just use the original amp for the subwoofer (it's inside that box). So the good speakers are still working even though the electronics are failing.

Re: another 'Google is Evil' example

I had largely stopped reading El Reg back when Lewis was all over it. Fukushima? Nothing to see here, right this way... But they canned him and the site is back to its full glory. To the extent that they question greenwashing, that's fair, and actually pro-environment. BS is generally bad for the environment.

High-resolution display output or Wi-Fi: It seems you can only choose one on Raspberry Pi 4

Re: Emulation speed?

I still have a PDP-11/03 based machine in storage. Its power supply capacitors have not lasted 40 years so ti won't run any more without some hardware repair. But with its two 8" floppies and 60 KB RAM it was a reasonably fun machine in its day.

Microsoft got its name because they made software for microcomputers, those being smaller than minicomputers. And microcomputers are what we call desktops, laptops, or small servers these days. So a pi is more of a nanocomputer. There is no reason to promote it to minicomputer unless you come up with some sense switches for it.

Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed

Re: The Internet is for everyone

No, blockchain isn't the answer. It never is. But there could be alternative roots.

ICANN has no legal authority. It is not a government regulator (thank FSM). It is a consultancy. It recommends that DNS resolvers point to its selected roots. But you can run a DNS server of your own and point it wherever you want. Louis Pouzin, who invented the Internet (in France in 1972), ran an alternative root a while ago.

Of course it takes the ISPs that most users systems point to to make a difference. And they're not going to shift unless things get really bad. And ICANN has not been really bad, even if decisions like this cause some serious head scratching. But the option exists.

Why can't you be a nice little computer maker and just GET IN THE TRUNK, Xerox tells HP in hostile takeover alert

Re: But HP are shift.... and I may be completly out of the loop here.

Spin off the computers and leave Xerox with the HP Ink? Hmmm, what might that spinoff be called? How about Compaq?

Boffins blow hot and cold over li-ion battery that can cut leccy car recharging to '10 mins'

Re: Charge or just swap the batteries?

Most fuel cell car efforts have been a feint -- doing something for show that you know won't succeed but which distracts from the real issue.

Fuel cells generally require a supply of unbound hydrogen (H2). That's devilishly hard to store, since its atoms are so small. And it doesn't exist in nature, as it quickly oxidizes into water. So the supply of hydrogen at those few fuel-cell charging stations is generally natural gas, which can, with the application of heat (i.e., energy), be broken down into hydrogen and carbon. But it's much more efficient overall to just burn the damned natural gas as a fuel. As many buses here in Boston do (much cleaner than diesel).

Fuel cell hydrogen can also be generated via reformers, but those too take heat, and thus waste energy. So no practical reformer fuel cell vehicles have shown up. Reformers are however used in some static fuel cells, like in the telecom outside plant, where natural gas pipeline fuel is available.

Scott McNealy gets touchy feely with Trump: Sun cofounder hosts hush-hush reelection fundraiser for President

Re: Sun Radio.

I think it was when Nixon got into trouble that the tactic you describe was given the term "plausible deniability".

The myth of the "free market" is that it operates outside of government regulation. But a market cannot exist without regulation. Government enforces honesty, punishes prevents fraud, and provides public safety, even in an actual Smithian market. Today's so-called free marketers are really just wanna-be freebooters, who want to rob the public via their unregulated power.

Mozilla Firefox to begin slow rollout of DNS-over-HTTPS by default at the end of the month

Re: Dubious

I only disagree on your last point -- I don't see where this is ever a good thing! DoH breaks a lot. It only protects against one phantom menace, that your current DNS provider or ISP is spying on your queries. But they're not. (There is enough other spying that DNS is not worth the effort.) Instead, it feeds your browser queries to Mozilla's spy, er, DNS engine, where it can spy on all of your browsing, override all of your DNS-based filtering, and put your DNS queries into your browser cache where they can be spied upon more easily. It's just a rotten idea that fails to die. Users should be advised to turn it off if it is activated, and to abandon an otherwise good browser if it becomes mandatory.

Like a grotty data addict desperately jonesing for its next fix, Google just can't stop misbehaving

Re: @ cantankerous swineherd

That was Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's company. It was split into about 39 separate companies. And after a few years, Rockefeller's stock in the many companies was worth about three times what it had been in one big company. So he cried all the way to the bank (which he owned too).

As others have noted, search is not where Google is at its creepiest. It's their ubiquitous Google Analytics, and their other ad trackers, including DoubleClick (their ad network).

How four rotten packets broke CenturyLink's network for 37 hours, knackering 911 calls, VoIP, broadband

Re: Going Postal?

No, the lollipop-shaped number space was a mistake. As was putting the MAC address into the NSAPA. Both ideas came from DECnet Phase V. Radia Perlman, a brilliant woman, came up with the lollipop-shaped space, but later told me (I was at DEC) that it was wrong, and didn't really fix anything. But sometimes a mistake is taken to be gospel, and even its inventors can't correct it. TCP/IP is full of them. And they're obvious if you don't (incorrectly) assume that their creators were smarter than you. Radia was smarter and she admitted a mistake. Lesser minds pretend to be infallible. And sometimes get elected.

But the problem occurred because there was no working supervisory channel. Americans don't follow the ITU. It's quite possible that Infinera or CenturyLink (an old line telco not known for smarts, just a knack for buying shit up) thought that inband management would be sufficient, since everybody knows that DWDM networks have lots of bandwidth.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: Touch screens

Yes, there is melting, and sea level is rising. However, whinging about touch screen or catalytic converters isn't relevant to that. Higher efficiency transport overall would help.

Of course some folks think electric cars are the answer. But the Tesla is ruled by one giant f'ng touchscreen. And self-driving is another bit where the last 10% will take 90% of the work, if it is even possible.

Hey dudes, we need to start living together in Harmony: Huawei puffs up new distributed OS

Huawei may be on to something. Some microkernels (Mach comes to mind) don't do IPC well, and that's a huge part of their job. All networking is IPC. So an IPC-optimized microkernel with QoS-aware scheduling would be a great start for a communicating device. And what isn't?

Of course bugs and back doors in actual products could be a different story.

Get ready for a literal waiting list for European IPv4 addresses. And no jumping the line

Re: We need a new approach

IPv6 was a mistake and most users know it. Friends don't let friends use IPv6.

Most young whippersnappers these days, who weren't around back then, don't know how IPv6 happened. It was not one of the IETF's prouder moments, if there even is such a thing. During the 1980s, the OSI project forked two different network layers, one based on X.25 and favored by PTTs and IBM, the other connectionless (CLNP) and favored by most other computer companies. CLNP was very much an internetworking protocol, which had learned from the mistakes of 1978's TCP/IP v4. It was being rolled out in most routers of the day (late 1980s-early 1990s). And ca. 1991 IAB adopted a profile of it, called TUBA, as the next IP. But the k1ddi3z of the IETF viewed OSI as The Enemy, and CLNP's OSI taint, even though it came from the friendly side (mainly DEC), made it unacceptable. So Vint Cerf changed his mind and withdrew support for TUBA and the IPv6 effort began. The "A team" working on "IPng" quit, and an effort coalesced around a B team. Their charge was not to fix any flaws in IP (security? fragmentation? aggregation? multihoming?), just raise the address size. And they came out with IPv6. I call it Children's Crusade Protocol because it is foolishness accepted only because it comes from an undeserving "authority".

A better path would be RINA (Recursive InterNetworking Architecture). See the Pouzin Society, IRATI.EU, or other sources to learn about it. It uses one layer mechanism recursively, as required, not a fixed size stack. It can encapsulate IP or be encapsulated in IP, so it is much more compatible with IPv4 networks and easier to adopt than IPv6. It just doesn't have commercial-grade implementations yet. But as a true clean slate approach, it shows that the IETF has gone off in the wrong direction for years.

Just add water: Efficient Energy’s HFC-free chillers arrive in the UK

A ton is simply 12,000 BTU, so it's a pretty straightforward conversion. Generally tons are used when it's bigger than a domestic system, which would be measured in BTU. A house might have 24,000 BTU while a commercial chiller could have five tons, rather than say 60,000 BTU.

But what's missing from the article is EER/SEER, which are the ratios of BTUs to watts. How efficient is the system? If it needs more electricity, then its GWP is worse. Refrigerants may not be good for the environment but these are sealed systems, and it normally gets collected when the system is removed or replaced. The worst refrigerants are no longer in use anyway, except (illegally) in China.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Re: ReactOS is in Alpha

It is clearly inspired by VMS. But then that's understandable -- the lead author of Windows NT was David N. Cutler, who had been the leader of VAX/VMS back in the late 1970s, and of RSX-11 before that. So he could re-implement the parts of VMS he liked most from memory. But a lot of good things in VMS are missing from Windows. Take, for instance, device names. Windows follows the MS-DOS tradition of A: and B: for floppies, C: for the system disk, etc. Kinda limiting. VMS uses longer names, like SYS$SYSTEM, and lets the administrator assign them to devices as they see fit. VMS also had four rings of protection (K E S U), implemented on VAX hardware.

America's latest 5G drama: Spectrum row bursts into the open with special adviser fingered as agent provocateur

Re: It stupidity anyway

Hi-fi audio (venue quality, not highend) requres about 100 kbps. And you're talking about a broadcast, not lots of unicasts. That can be done on low spectrum, narrow channels. It needs 24 GHz the same way you need a fleet of Peterbilt trucks to drive your kid to school in the morning, and school is only 200 meters away.

Not very bright: Apple geniuses spend two weeks, $10,000 of repairs on a MacBook Pro fault caused by one dumb bug

Re: U.S. definition of "torch"

Maybe that explains Elon Musk. An English guy says he needs a torch. Musk thinks, hey, I can one-up any old torch and I'll sell a flamethrower!

That of course assumes that Musk, raised in Canada, knows it as a flashlight like we do in the US, and thus a torch means actual fire.

China trade tariffs? Fuhgeddaboudit, say Cisco execs. We, er, shifted some production

Re: Screwdriver job

The irony is that there isn't all that much Chinese content or value in a lot of these products, especially the iPhone. The real hardware value is in the semiconductors, which are rarely Chinese. In the case of routers, it's also mostly in the software. An iPhone is assembled by Foxconn in China for maybe $5, using lots of Korean, American, German, Taiwanese, and other parts. So the tariff is really >100% weighed against the Chinese content.

But that does suggest that "final assembly" can be moved elsewhere without changing much, especially for Cisco, whose packaging is not at all exotic (PC boards and SFP sockets in a metal case). Maybe the boards can be stuffed in China (harder to move) while the case is screwed shut in Vietnam or Mexico. I seem to remember that loose screws were enough to deem a car a "kit" in the UK. Of course assembled British cars had that problem too... ;-) (sorry, we Gringos aren't known for having built the best-made cars but we could at least look down on English ones).

Firefox armagg-add-on: Lapsed security cert kills all browser extensions, from website password managers to ad blockers

Yes, but if it goes to two guys, and both get it, then they'll both think that the other guy will do it...

Boeing boss denies reports 737 Max safety systems weren't active

The real problem boils down to three letters: MBA. Muilenberg and his cronies come from the school of generic financial managers. Boeing used to be run by aircraft experts, and their accountants told them how they were doing and how much they had to charge. The newer MBA culture is all about shaving pennies at the excuse of anything. Thus they tried to modify a 737 rather than design an inherently-stable plane with the bigger engines, like an A321. They tried to avoid retraining pilots. They tried to limit recertification. They charged extra for safety features like the AOA disagreement warning ($80,000). The result is bad planes, like the MAX, which is, as Ralph Nader once says, "unsafe at any speed".

All of the executives involved with creating approving that fustercluck should be fired and imprisoned for negligent manslaughter. The company should be put under receivership, the MAX retired, and they should go back to the new-plane program they abandoned when the bean counting MBAs decided that they could get the MAX to market faster.

Mayors having a right 'mare in Florida: Acting mayor arrested weeks after boss also arrested

We *are* talking Florida here. Look, most of the people I run into have an "above-average" intelligence. Somebody has to be below average. That's what Florida is for. They have two fetishes. One is being stupid, or at least electing stupid people. The other is guns. It's a deadly combination, but the NRA and its sponsor gun makers make out like bandits there. As do the bandits. At least the old mayor had apparently once been a doctor, just a bad one. And this being America, without an NHS, a lot of people depend on whatever medical help they can find, and can't afford a real doctor. He was probably better at it than the faith healers that are so popular in the American south.

Vermont, on the other hand, is not stupid, just snowy. Like other New England states, its Towns do not have mayors, as the executive is handled by the Select Board and the legislative by Town Meeting (everyone who shows up votes). And they do make good cheese. So there's nothing a mayor does there that a goat can't do. And come spring, the goat can help keep the lawns and weeds in check.

Dear Britain's mast-fearing Nimbys: Do you want your phone to work or not?

Re: mast sharing

Here in the US, the mobile carriers don't own many of their own towers. They lease space from tower companies (who bought out the ones the carriers originally built). That way the towers are all shared by anyone who wants to pay the rent. Tower companies also broker spaces on rooftops and the like.

Our towers have no height limit per se. After all, we have lots of big broadcast towers, and TV transmitter towers are often over 300 meters tall. In many rural areas, mobile towers are usually 195 or 199 feet tall. That's because at 200 feet, aircraft protection rules kick in and the tower would have to be illuminated and painted in stripes, like broadcast towers. Of course local government often do set their own height limits, subject to federal intervention. We also have towers disguised as trees, but they're usually not convincing. Here in New England, we also have a lot of old church steeples used as antenna towers.

Linus Torvalds pulls pin, tosses in grenade: x86 won, forget about Arm in server CPUs, says Linux kernel supremo

Re: well done

Good sci-fi has plausibility. Generating intermediate code is quite plausible. 128-bit GaAs processors running at THz speeds is not. GaAs runs rather hot and extremely high speed semiconductors are not likely to use it. Millimeter wave radios today have migrated to SiGe.

Re: Speaking of those Nike shoes...

Let's destroy the metaphor completely. Nike's job will only be done when they put their self-lacing technology onto boots. Only then will the bootstrap process really involve bootstraps.

Re: DEC HALs

VAX/VMS did not have a HAL; it was written for the VAX architecture. The early VAXen did have writeable control store, the PDP-11 instruction mode, and some other obscure features, but eventually they settled on the MicroVAX native instruction set. Maybe the later "OpenVMS" had some HAL features, but I left DEC before then. It was the Alpha chip that did interesting abstractions in hardware, and could be optimized for VMS, Unix, or NT.

Only plebs use Office 2019 over Office 365, says Microsoft's weird new ad campaign

Office 2007 changed file formats to OOXML, and also expanded Excel sheets from 64K to 1024K rows. That helps me a lot; 64K was way too small.

I'm not sure what meaningfully changed later. In 2014 I bought Office 2010 and still use it; 2013 didn't seem any better and I think a couple of things were reportedly worse. And I still don't like the ribbon.

DNAaaahahaha: Twins' 23andMe, Ancestry, etc genetic tests vary wildly, surprising no one

Re: Furthermore...

She didn't say she did or didn't absolutely have native ancestry. She has however noted that her father's family did not approve of his marrying her mother (if I have the direction right) because she was part Indian, and the father's white family did not like that. So either the racist family of the father was wrong, or there was some Indian ancestry, which is pretty common among toubab in Oklahoma (f/k/a Indian Territory).

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Re: Windows 10 scares the shit outta me

Windows Update MiniTool looks like a very useful accessory, if it actually prevents the automatic updates from occurring and gives back full control over updates. But someone asked them a q in 2017 about that -- since it is a standalone program, how does it stop Windows 10 from updating itself anyway?