Posts by Mikel

Tesla, Musk double down on $56B payday appeal

A deal is a deal.

Pay up.

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

We all have our own opinions on this.

IBM tried to take back the open nature of the PC with their proprietary MicroChannel Architecture with its planar boards and fixed disks because if you own the language on the interface and human level then you win.

But they partnered with their chief software competitor, a known scurrilous rogue, to develop an OS to compete with itself. It doesn't take Carnac the Magnificent to figure out how that's going to go.

Gelsinger departs Intel with $9.7M handshake

A heartbeat away

The Musk pay being decided is for work already done and achievements already met. No foresight is necessary. He is currently working for free without a contract since it's pointless to make a new deal with someone who hasn't delivered on the old one.

Starlink offers 'unusually hostile environment' to TCP

We love it.

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.

Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users as rivals smell an opportunity

Software innovation = license portability

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/

RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth

Nooooo

A great loss.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

"downloading large software packages."

The meaning of the term "large software packages" was significantly different at the time.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Around ans around

>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.

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

Space is hard

But not this hard.

The Boeing statement on the issue was hilarious though. Talk about spin.

That they won't take ownership of the failure here doesn't inspire confidence.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

It takes time

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.

Re: "Diversity will destroy this company"

>Even if he has picked up an MBA somewhere (?), Gelsinger clearly has an accomplished engineering background.

Gelsinger's creds are legit.

Oracle shrinks on-prem cloud offering in both size and cost

Back to the future

Next up: on prem bare metal hosting. There are a number of terms in the article dissonant with "Oracle": affordable, not locked in among them.

Putin threatens supply chains with counter-sanction order

If you rely on Russian supply...

Then you ain't the sharpest tool in the shed.

NASA advised to study up on what open source, free software, and permissive licenses actually mean

CEO of an undisclosed startup

Aren't we all?

You've heard of HTTPS. Now get a load of HTTPA: Web services in verified remote trusted environments?

Reflections On Trusting Trust - Brian Kernighan

Trust: The opportunity you give another to do harm.

When you trust the network you have strayed from the path of righteousness. Repent.

Intel teases 'software-defined silicon' with Linux kernel contribution – and won't say why

There goes the brand

Crippleware chips. A bold move.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

Re: Apple Too

Original? Let me explain MicroChannel Architechture.

So what can we expect from a Joe Biden White House when it comes to tech? We'll try to answer that right now

So, about that...

If you could avoid bringing up the embarrassing last four years that would be.much appreciated.

- Your US friends.

Get in the C: Raspberry Pi 4 can handle a wider range of USB adapters thanks to revised design's silent arrival

Not worried

Got the psu in a package deal with my launch pi4 because of this issue. But power it by the pins now.

It's a fun little computer. Am enjoying it a lot.

I wonder what Pi5 will bring.

Guess what's on the receiving end of more NASA dollars for SLS?

Re: 2024...hmm...Trumps 3rd term??!

This was my impression. Lock in the long term pork contract.

Raspberry Pi head honcho Eben Upton talks thermals, stores and who's buying the kit

Thermals

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.

Alibaba: There's a trade war going on? Could've fooled us – just check out these swollen digits

All express has some great stuff

It takes me a long time to find what I am looking for, but they have some amazing things. And then it takes two weeks to ship it. The prices are amazing though.

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

AMD is hot right now

For me the telling thing will be Intel's response. If they don't reach into the back of the cupboard and pull out something shiny in the next 2 months, AMD is going to have a really good time of it for a while.

This time I don't think Intel has the shiny thing.

Microsoft Bing is 10: That thing you accidentally use to search for Chrome? Still alive and kicking

Bing Is Not Google

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.

HP boss: Intel shortages are steering our suited customers to buy AMD

AMD is cool again

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.

Now here's a Galaxy far, far away: Samsung stalls Fold rollout after fold-able screens break in hands of reviewers

Recycling

I wonder how many foldy screen phones they're going to have to recycle.

Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

For the cost of an Oracle license

For the cost of an Oracle license you can buy some beefy hardware to run postgres on. And professional support. And retraining for the staff. And a nice boat.

And here's Intel's Epyc response: Up-to 56-core, 4GHz 14nm second-gen Xeon SP chips, Agilex FPGAs, persistent mem

Look at the thing

It looks like you could fry bacon on it.

SpaceX Crew Dragon: Launched and docked. Now, about that splashdown...

Re: Make them an offer?

>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.

Re: Landing

Heavy seas too.

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

Far from the roots of Unix have you fallen dear Linus

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.

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

Deprecate Bing next please

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.

If at first or second you don't succeed, you may be Microsoft: Hold off installing re-released Windows Oct Update

Re: Technical debt

>And to think that some people actually have to buy this mess. £119 or thereabouts I believe.

The sacrificial computer to try these things out on before you trust them with your data costs much more.

It's the real Heart Bleed: Medtronic locks out vulnerable pacemaker programmer kit

I would like to tell about my hospital technology sales experience

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.

Intel boss admits chips in short supply, lobs cash into the quagmire

AMD has a window of opportunity

They appear to be well positioned to take advantage of it.

It's been 5 years already, let's gawp at Microsoft and Nokia's bloodbath

Re: Not far enough back.

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.

Not far enough back.

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.

Lo and behold, Earth's special chemical cocktail for life seems to be pretty common

Re: So, why don't we still have dinosaurs?

Every day a new and innovative form of protolife is formed on Earth. And the highly competitive evolved life forms find them delicious.

It's 2018, and a webpage can still pwn your Windows PC – and apps can escape Hyper-V

So glad I don't have to work with this any more.

That's no moon... er, that's an asteroid. And it'll be your next and final home, spacefarer

The Heinlein story

It was an old story about youths in such a craft who had lost their parents and forgotten the mission.

Re: Life Aboard A Colony

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.

Mueller bombshell: 13 Russian 'troll factory' staffers charged with allegedly meddling in US presidential election

Re: I'm more blown away by THIS Bomshell....

It's a private hosted server with a private VPN. Not a shared service. Not sure why they needed boots on the ground for this, since you can do it on Amazon.

Re: I'm Confused Still

>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.

Nvidia reports record revenues in latest fiscal quarter

Still hard to get a decent GPU

Supply is constrained so either AMD and nVidia aren't charging enough or they're not building enough, or both.

Elon Musk's Tesla burns $675.3m in largest ever quarterly loss

An anecdote

I have a friend who has a Model 3 on order. Although he is eager to get his car, he is OK with waiting until "whenever it's ready." He wouldn't consider giving up his place in line.

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF CARS: SpaceX parks a Tesla in orbit (just don't mention the barge)

Re: Can't sell it, the battery's old and tired.

We'll send it at night.

Re: Orbit / Broadcast Longevity

Musk said 12 hours.

Exoplanets from another galaxy spotted – take that, Kepler fatigue!

A dash of salt

I expect this to be debunked shortly. 3.8 billion light years is just too far to see planets.

Microsoft works weekends to kill Intel's shoddy Spectre patch

Emergency patch issued to restore vulnerability

You really can't make this stuff up.

America restarts dodgy spying program – just as classified surveillance abuse memo emerges

Responsible observation

"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.