Posts by Mikel 2644 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008
Jitter is a thing. It's gotten much better, as has latency. Early on drops were common but not for over a year. I am not seeing the wide variation in bandwidth reported here. It's been sufficient to our use from the first day.
I have had Starlink since early on and find it adequate for my home use. I'm not trying to do remote robotic surgery with the thing.
This show is so over. Once again: The purpose of commercial software is to get you hooked on features and then take your data and business processes hostage. From that point forward you work for them.
>claiming license portability as one such innovation.
There you go. The innovation is in the way they milk you for more money. To them the purpose of your business is to generate revenue to pay their Board. It's social engineering, not software engineering.
You can have virtualization on unlimited cores, clusters, nodes with any amount of RAM and storage without paying anything at all. Other people worked on virtualization software together in team spirit and shared it because extorting licensing fees for efforts incidental to improving their business process isn't part of their business model. And you can buy support for it at reasonable rates too.
Throwback time: https://linuxgenuineadvantage.org/
>These are EXPENSIVE products and they may never support non-RHEL installations. And they may not even work even if you could install them. And sometimes there are no viable alternatives.
The point of UNIX and hence Linux is to provide a set of tools that can be rebuilt on any platform so that the platform vendor cannot take hostage your business processes and data, and inevitably destroy them when they go under. So congrats on reimplementing that hazard using the tool designed to prevent it.
Intel is a big ship. It takes time to turn. We aren't going to see the real effects of Gelsinger's leadership for a couple years, good or bad. If you don't work there anyway. The real key is when the team internalizes "what is it, exactly, that we do here?" And then the good stuff happens, and that pipeline takes years to show up on the retail shelf. He could be leading the ship onto the rocks. Or not. But we won't know for quite a while.
So. Looking to upgrade my kit after a long hiatus and not buying any of the stories the old school pundits are pushing about nanometers not being important. Tomorrow will come when tomorrow comes. Today - rather, this Fall - the choice is clear.
I got one of those fan heatsinks. It's wraparound and nearly a case in itself. It works fine.
My problem with these handy little inexpensive education computers is that now I have thousands of things I want to do with them and can't advance them all at once. Been wanting a home OScope my whole life and now that I have that nothing short of an electronic makerspace will do.
There are worse problems to have.
I never get tired of that recursive backronym.
Bing was Ballmer's attempt to "cut off Google's air supply" after Google poached some key engineers. You can read about that colorful discussion here on El Reg. Bing killed off nearly every other search provider, but never put a scratch on Google. When Microsoft finally surrenders after bleeding more money than the GDP of a small nation, Google will inherit the balance from sheer survival and not have the guilt of beating all those small fry to death.
In desktop, server and laptops, AMD has never had a stronger proposition against Intel in their 50 year history. Superior node, better thermals, more cores, better Instructions Per Clock, more I/O lanes are just a few features On 7/7 they'll even be ahead on critical PCIe version with double the bandwidth per lane. Even the memory architecture is better, with less vulnerability to the cross process leakage Intel is seeing. Vendor support is through the roof with proper high end boards and features, rather than the flimsy boards of years past when vendors cheaped out on components and failed to deliver the AMD product's full potential.
I don't think Intel is going to be wounded, but AMD should be able to grow their business quite a lot in the next two years. If AMD keep up the pace and Intel continue to stumble this might turn into a race in a few years.
>The other issue is: Where is the fuel coming from? If it's coming from Earth, what are you saving by sending the fuel & vehicle up separately?
Mars is very far. You need a lot of provisions to get there, and Delta-V when you arrive. GTO is pretty much the halfway point to anywhere in the solar system in terms of Delta-V.
It makes sense to boost as much ship and supplies as you can on one rocket, and fuel on others. A fully fuelled ship that can lift off Earth, departing from orbit is just better.
Since the fuel ships are fully reusable and can make many flights, and the fuel is practically free, it can be much more economical that designing a vast ship that must launch its own weight as well as huge supplies of fuel from the ground. That excess fuel capacity from Earth liftoff isn't going to be helpful on the long journey.
The whole point of Unix was that monopolistic hardware makers would lock in their customers' data (and programs... Programs are data), making them hostage to the vendors' sales team (and the vendors' inevitable collapse). The relevant decision was that the end user's commitment was to his own data - the data is the business case for the technology. The user owns his data, and can choose to manipulate it only with tools he can take anywhere. And so C was invented in a way that a microscopic bit of compiler could be hand built on whatever new architecture you wanted to adopt, and you could use that to built an optimizing compiler from the plain text source. After that you could compile all of your common utilities from text - and if the system didn't offer the desired features you could port the kernel over and run on that.
Migration. The end user's data and business logic belongs to them, and letting them maintain ownership and control of it is -the point-. Linux's raison d'être. Otherwise we could just use whatever. And lose our data over and over - as in the days of yore when we wore an onion on our belt as was the fashion at the time.
/Wow it has been a long time since I've been here.
It's odd seeing Windows people moaning about monoculture as if they cared, and then following up with how great their own monoculture is.
When they're done throwing IE and Edge on the heap they can send Bing on its way also. Never was more than a vainglorious assault on Google's air supply, accomplished nothing against the Google market share but swept all others from the field. And spent tens of billions of dollars. Enough money to build a Mars colony.
Regrettably, telling that tale involves losing all my worldly wealth.
Suffice to say that the state of technology purchasing, maintenance and support is regrettable. I wouldn't tell my doctor anything I wouldn't post on Facebook.
By the way: I was here when this happened. I posted here before the fact how, when and why this was going to happen. If you can review my comments that far back you can see that I knew and I warned everyone who would listen.
If you suffered in this plot, at least I am blameless.
During his global farewell tour a lucky journalist asked Bill Gates about regrets. About retiring and aspirations not completed. He replied "I didn't beat Nokia." That was the inspiration for his successor to achieve the goal he could not.
Ballmer followed the example of Sendo documented here, where Microsoft's Marc Brown sat on the company's board and killed it from within. On his own retirement Nokia's chairman said that "American investors" had made it clear to him that he would appoint Microsoft's Elop as CEO or he would be replaced and Elop would get the seat anyway.
Before he even sat in that chair Elop had negotiated a compensation package structured in such a way that if he killed the company and sold its corpse to Microsoft, he would achieve the maximum personal benefit. He knew from the first day that was his objective: to get the price down to the point where Microsoft could buy it.
It collapsed the economy of Finland. The Finnish government retirement fund was nearly wiped out. I don't know why Finland didn't lock the lot of them up for industrial sabotage.
It turns out that for certain paths through our solar system, Proxima Centauri is "down". With a gentle push many astroids could be put on such a path and gravity will do the rest.
It's just a matter of finding the paths and the most likely astroid to put on it. It is likely possible to do without any propulsion on board at all, using only paint to alter the albedo.
>Russian trolls were publishing things to social media but the conclusion is that this had no outcome on the US election.
That is not the conclusion. The conclusion is that the effect, or lack of effect, is neither proven nor alleged. Many people are deliberately conflating lack of evidence with evidence of lack, to carry their message that nothing came of it. That is a psychological operation, propaganda, that cynically trades on the general poor state of the average intellect.
It doesn't help that those with poor reasoning need little more than the hint to embrace the false conclusion and then share it far and wide as the Gospel Truth. But let's be adults here, just among ourselves. The conclusion that these efforts had no effect is not in this document release, nor in any other of the Special Prosecutor, nor of the wider Intelligence Community consensus. You made it up.
"That eavesdropping fits very squarely within the remit of FISA, which allows US spies to intercept the communications of American citizens if they are seen to be communicating with foreign intelligence targets."
Yes. When foreign spies are conspiring with your political candidates to overthrow your government, that is squarely within the remit of the "National Security Agency" by definition.
IE sucks. Microsoft Edge sucks. Bing sucks. Windows sucks. Objectively, they all suck. The purpose for IE and Edge in Windows is to preinstall an app that you can use to Google and install a decent browser.
You should search in Google with Chrome or Firefox, and it turns out you overwhelmingly do - Even though IE and Edge come preinstalled and Bing set as the default.
You should use Linux or BSD. And more do every day.
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