* Posts by Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

560 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jan 2009

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Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Serves Google right

NOTE: this is not a guaranteed solution, Google periodically attempts to stymie this avanue of access, but I've been using it for years with only two or three very brief interruptions in service.

Interruptions may become more frequent as others are doing the Aurora thing now. Up to now I've used f-droid & Aurora too but my latest phone is a murena one running /e/ os (thanks for the review Reg!) and that has it's own app for anonymous play store access. Google could take that as time to try harder at blocking anon access.

OTOH regulators do seem to enjoy getting their teeth into Google (long may that last). G used to publicly argue that if you didn't stay logged into the store you might miss updates and get pwned. Technologically that is a bollocks association and I think we have the regular hassling they get to thank for such specious arguments fading. So it could get easier to use the play store anonymously, time will tell.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/02/murena_e_foundation_phone_test/

Job 1: Get the boss on the network. Job 2: Figure out why Job 1 broke the network for everyone else

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: What's the password?

Man I'm slow some days. It was only when I read this comment that the penny dropped as to which theme park it was.

InSight Mars lander has only 'few weeks' of power left

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit
Pint

Re: Use inclined solar panels

Thank you for this. My inner arm chair commentard engineer also jumped straight to 'turn them over & shake' or 'something clever involving electrostatic'. Real world me knows far brighter minds will have thought of anything a commentard can come up with decades ago. Still, it's good to read the confirmation.

Cheers ->

Can gamers teach us anything about datacenter cooling? Lenovo seems to think so

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Isn't it statingthe obvious that liquid cooling is more effective than air cooling?

- Risky failure modes - liquid cooling everything means an awful lot of plumbing and manifolds, and a lot of connections to all the systems. Leaks are bad news. Keeping all the lines air free is also demanding.

The article specifically mentioned closed loop liquid coolers and described what they are. There are no manifolds and there is no air problem because they are a sealed unit manufactured off site. In function they move a lot of heat in a small area to a larger area where air cooling can easily deal with it. They are much closer to a heat pipe cooler than they are to a pipes, manifolds & reservoir type system.

Traditional = CPU -> Heatsink & fan

Intermediate 'gamer technology' = CPU -> heat pipe -> heatsink & fan in chassis

or CPU -> closed loop system -> radiator & fan in chassis

Full water cooling = CPU -> water system -> bulk chillers outside the rack

This article is about brining the intermediate options to the data center. The only problem IME is the fluid in a closed system does degrade over time but the timescale is probably greater than the system replacement time in a bleeding edge data centre.

NASA details totally doable, not science fiction plan for sending Mars rocks to Earth

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Delivery Drones

Maybe but with a delivery address of 'Earth' Humanity is going to need to check a hell of a lot of hedges to find which one the package has been chucked under.

Is it a bird? Is it Microsoft Office? No, it's Onlyoffice: Version 7.2 released

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Interesting?

The latest point-release of Onlyoffice, a free Microsoft Office-compatible suite, is here with multiple small improvements

Hmmm, I've had some issues with Libre Office recently, I wonder if this is worth looking at. I'll read on....

Onlyoffice has a more modern ribbon-based interface

Nope. Nopety nope nope. Thrice nope. With a great big side order of nope.

Emissions-slashing hybrid trains to hit tracks in Europe

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

I've always thought we missed the emissions train (ahem) by not doing the diesel electric hybrid in automobiles. A tiny turbodiesel optimized to drive a generator, with a small battery as a load bank, would likely get somewhere in the 100MPG range even in a larger vehicle.

That's basically what a BMW i3 Rex is all be in petrol rather than diesel and a useful sized battery not a small one. I'm unconvinced a small desiesal is good idea, aren't the emissions even worse?

<fx>tappity tappity duck</fx>

yep, Euro 6 is basically killing off small diesels. (IMHO - yay!)

Boffins spot baby planet forming around young star – and that's rather cool

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Did they really see it?

Where do I begin answering your questions jake? It doesn't matter, the pills won't help you now.

(yes AC did and yes)

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit
Pint

Re: Did they really see it?

Oh bravo sir, bravo! ->

To preserve Earth's treasures, digital silence is golden

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Agent Smith was correct about humans.

NIST and uni friends to design open source research chips, Google to bankroll the fabs

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Back in the early days of my career when I was an electronic engineer the cost of manufacture of professional quality PCBs was astronomical. You could self etch but let's be honest, they were crap. Now you can order multi layer tinned PCBs with solder mask and silk screen of exactly the same quality as in any commercial product in batches of 5+ for peanuts. You can even get the pick & place parts soldered on for $0.00. I wonder if this is a step in the same direction for custom ICs.

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: 2.8 tonne - of magnets?

That over four times the weight of a BMC Mini.

Yep, and less than double the weight of a BINI. 50% more than a classic Range Rover or about the same as a new Range Rover. 6x a classic Fiat 500 or 3x a modern one. Way over double a Mk I Land Rover defender with a chassis like the Forth bridge or about the same as a new LR Defender.

There's no reason for a car of any size to exceed two tons. Even that's porky.

Modern cars are fat, bloated monstrosities.

Scientists pull hydrogen from thin air in promising clean energy move

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: HVDC

I sit corrected, thanks for the education.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: HVDC

s/can/should be able to/

Longest interconnector in the world is 450 miles currently. I expect we'll get to thousands of kilometers at practical & acceptable losses but we're not there yet.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Not really, no.

As electricity transportation scales it gets more difficult (increased voltage and/or current). Storing it in movable batteries obviously scales badly too. Transporting electricity intercontinental distances is rare, the longest interconnector in the world is 450 miles (UK<->Norway). Connecting countries such as Algeria to Europe gets mooted every now & then but I've not seen a project gain any traction (happy to be corrected natch).

OTOH, pipelines transport gasses easily. Yes there will be losses due to the famous ability of hydrogen to leak through just about anything but that leakage is not going to be at a rate to create a fire or explosion risk. Bigger leaks at joints etc yes but we manage to live with those risks from other gasses in pipelines. And if you replace a small pipeline with a bigger one your efficiency goes up. Transporting gasses intercontinental distances is common, there's 4 pipelines over 2500 miles.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

It'll be the middle of Australia, it always is. There some kind of magnetic attraction* about the place.

*Yes I know there's not much ferrous material in a rocket.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Now 100,000kg smaller

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: collective stupidity

^^^ Not enough upvotes in the world for this ^^^

Eutelsat and OneWeb to join forces across orbits in $3.4b merger

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: RoI

You know Gordon* retired, right?

* Nice guy IMO, one of the very few politicians we've ever seen in power for who feathering their own nest was not priorities 1 through 7. It's just unfortunate that fiscally speaking he couldn't find his own arse with both hands and a map. Not so bad as a PM, he's Number 2 on my list**.

** I don't rate them on how good they are because in my lifetime there hasn't been a good one yet. I rate on how harmful they aren't.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Works for me

My first pi had issues but the SD was as cheap as I could find. So as the saying goes I bought twice. C10 Kingston were fine with Pi 1 so I stuck with them in my brace of 3s and a load of zeros. Kingston C10s weren't a problem as such in my Pi 4s but I gradually realised performance was underwhelming. So I RTFM (shocking I know) and yeah, C10 is way under spec for a 4 confirmed by the now baked in SD tester in Pi OS. Changing to U1 and going 64 bit utterly transformed it - it flies!

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

@ExiledChris

Good post, thank you for real world experiences of FCEV. They are very rare in the UK so far.

"FCs make sense for HGVs and construction equipment,"

Vibration and dust are problems for fuel cells in construction equipment. There's an interesting Fully Charged episode about work JCB have done, they investing heavily in hydrogen ICE instead.

British boffins make touchless computing tech on the cheap

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

" It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program."

Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

One thing worth looking at for a person of your skillset (if you don't have it already) is a small ground mounted solar PV. If you have somewhere south facing especially. An 800W first system on the site can be installed without any paperwork at all (you are in the UK?), you don't even need to notify your supplier. Fitting yourself saves an awful lot of the usual cost. You just need to install a fused spur in your ring main and controller with 2 current coils at the fuse board. I use Enphase gear which wants to phone the mothership but obviously it's up to you. Mine is on my guest WiFi so can't reach anything else even if it did get hacked. When I have time I'll finish setting up per panel local logging & then disconnect, I'm already logging system production and whole house load.

Mine is perfectly south facing but shaded from ~14:00, the payback is looking like about 8 years on £1k investment with the current electricity prices. It's a very rare day indeed that it generates nothing and averaged 1.2kWh/day in 2021. It's not about going 'off grid' or powering anything in particular, it simply reduces the cost of all those always on base loads.

Fun little learning project.

Export bans prompt Russia to use Chinese x86 CPU replacement

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: 6502

I really don't see how byting the poor equine is justified, is being shiny so offensive?

Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Simple? My arse!

Agreed on greenshot (work is still on windows). Great for those online training death-by-powerpoint sessions where they won't give you the slides & expect you to write everything down for the test at the end.

Only minor grumble is I always get confused by the auto number setting when I need to do the inevitable re-sync.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Simple? My arse!

But, if all you need is basic image manipulation, Gimp will serve you well and it's also free.

My idea of simple image manipulation is paste in a screenshot and crop a section to put in an email, doc or to print. Perhaps draw a red circle round something I want to highlight. I can do those in paint in less time than it takes Gimp to fire up. Gimp is far too complex for simple crap little jobs like that, which of the zillion selection options was it I need again?

I have tried about a dozen alternative graphics programs as I use Mint at home exclusively but I am yet to find a graphics program as simple and effective as mspaint. When I want Gimp I'll fire up Gimp. 99% of the time I don't.

Google's DeepMind says its AI coding bot is 'competitive' with humans

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

It's not about the code

The parts baking my noodle here (individually, never mind all together) are that DeepMind can understand the natural language problem, break it down into manageable chunks, find the optimal solution and explain it's working in plain English.

Generating syntactically correct code from 'small chunks of problem' seem like the easy bit to me.

I wonder how far it could get through an advent of code.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Air Force's Chief Information Officer Lauren Knausenberger

This is the problem. Not only do the oxygen thieves making the decisions have the newest kit they also sit 2 floors up from the data centre. Put them out in the remotest office you have with double the people the office was intended for and give them the oldest PC in the fleet.

Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

"In fact the first error is in the "auto""

That is too easy too. I agree that the Tesla should be sued for their advertising (or better still lead the marketing manager round the back of the barn as a warning to others) but that doesn't change the fact this 'poor sod' killed two people.

If it is deemed just a stupid act he should be let off? Hell no.

Either he was ignorant having not read the manual for his 2 ton killing machine, and as we know ignorance is no defense. Or he knew and wasn't paying attention anyway which is certainly criminally negligent.

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: I second that request.

"Let crypto miners build their power generation systems"

No, don't (and this is the point of the Sweden's request to the EU). It doesn't matter how the shitcoin miners are powered the energy is better used elsewhere. If shitcoin miners buy/build "solar, wind, battery banks, LPG generators" then the availability of those resources for others goes down and the prices go up. I would far rather those solar panels get used on someones roof to power that house. I'd rather the energy & carbon encapsulated in building that wind turbine resulted in more green tariff electricity being available in the grid for someone to cook their dinner with.

Branson (in a) pickle: FAA grounds Virgin Galactic flights after billionaire's space trip veered off course

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Yebbut "alternative facts" are not popular now. Even the tangerine shitgibbon in chief couldn't get away with them.

Cops responding to ShotSpotter's AI alerts rarely find evidence of gun crime, says Chicago watchdog

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

The watchdog said 50,176 alerts generated by ShotSpotter in Chicago between January 2020 and May this year probably were the result of gunfire

How many of these shots were fired by the police?

Japan's aerospace agency hooks up with Boeing to make planes quieter when they land

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Others use ...

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. There will be a short delay before we push back and taxi for takeoff while the underside of our aircraft is buttered. We'll be under way in a few minutes.

Thank you"

Perhaps regretting those Instagram, WhatsApp acquisitions, UK watchdog suggests Facebook offloads GIF haven Giphy

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Or?

Correctly.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

No it frikkin isn't.

That is all.

Happy birthday, Sinclair Radionics: We'll remember you for your revolutionary calculators and crap watches

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

And here...

Friend of a friend had a ZX81, I was utterly hooked first by 3D Monster Maze and then the amazing process of typing in a program to make it do other things. I was too young to consider writing a program, playing one was far more interesting. My career can be traced back to those heady summer days lying on the carpet praying the RAM pack didn't fall off again.

Have you turned it off and on again? Russia's Nauka module just about makes it to the ISS

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

and you put all the hookups on the outside ?

Mir had some hookups on the inside, this made closing the pressure doors in an emergency a slow process. Plus you really really don't want the cooling hookups leaking indoors.

The lights go off, broadband drops out, the TV freezes … and nobody knows why (spooky music)

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Shibboleet

True, which is a shame. Miss 17 took the time to open my account records before answering the call and opened with 'Hello Mr iShit. Are you calling about closing your account?' instead of the previous 16 calls unprepared 'How can I help you Mr,er..... <tappity tappity> iShit'. She put me on hold while calling department X and confirmed they had in fact done their job back in February, it just hadn't been recorded correctly. That resulted in ticket ping pong between departments each time I called. For four months. Later calls at which I insisted on talking to a manger whatever made absolutely no difference. Requests that they take ownership of the ticket and manage it through to conclusion were wasted breath.

It's just luck that on call 17 I hit the jackpot on the call allocation lottery. The call took 20 minutes in all and she'll probably get a bollocking at her next review.

Sigh.

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Shibboleet

I probably met the last remaining telephone company employee who actually gave a damn

In every company there is one person that gives a damn, they do 90% of the work. The rest just look for the tiniest excuse to fob you off or put the ticket back in the queue with a note (cannot complete because X is not done, Y is missing, request is in the wrong colour ink, there's a 'y' in the day). Call department X or Y and prod to get the work done? Oh no sir I cannot do that.

It recently took me 17 calls to Lloyds to get an account closed, a job that should have taken 2, one to initiate the process and a second a few days later to complete it. Call 1 was made in February, call 17 in June. The lovely young lady on call 17 deserves a medal, a raise and a job somewhere she isn't surrounded by idiots.

For tech companies to find the one person with clue the magic word should be well known hereabouts:

https://xkcd.com/806/

All hands on Steam Deck: Fancy a handheld Linux PC that runs Windows apps, sports a custom AMD Zen APU and a touch screen?

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

My wallet is worried

If I can find confirmation it'll run Portal, Portal II & KSP my wallet needs to be more than worried. I've been looking for a portable way to play those for years.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

And security?

Many years ago I made the mistake of accepting a job in a small company run by a right berk. Actually, it wasn't run by him. All financial decisions were taken by his accountant, all IT decisions were taken by the bloke at the computer shop down the street and many other decisions were taken by his wife.

Anyway, one of the decisions the bloke in the computer shop down the street took was that the office should be switched to WiFi, "it would be so much tidier & more professional looking". And a nice little earner for him no doubt. The office contained almost exclusively desktop (i.e. not readily portable) computers. Myself & a colleague walked in to find this one Monday morning, sighed and spent 10 minutes showing the boss articles on the net about WEP hacking. It was already a thing if you had patience (in the several days to few weeks range), it hadn't yet become trivial.

The Devils Radio should only be used where there's no practical wired alternative.

Happy 4.20: Latest version of Tails bakes connection wizard into pro-privacy Linux distro

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

The naughty list

This is where I feel we've lost something with the death of magazines with cover disks. If the next issue of PC Pro for example were to have a Tails 4.20 disk on the cover I would go out of my way to buy a copy. With cash & from a small newsagent of course. A one page article with a simple guide to verifying the disk (with tools not from the same disk) would help fill the edition.

I used to buy Pro every month, haven't done so for years.

I have no currently identified need for Tails. I like to keep my online footprint small & controllable starting with zero antisocial media accounts. All the same it's the kind of tool I'd like to have at hand just in case.

Linux Mint 20.2 is a bit more insistent about updating but not as annoying as Windows or Mac, team promises

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: painless

never had a surprise after a reboot for a new kernel.

I have just recently, non-booting system :-( Probably would have resulted in a full reinstall or a painful system restore in winblows.

On Linux it was simply a matter of booting off a disk and run timeshift to restore the hour old snapshot (gotta love BTRFS). Then retry the updates: applications - no problem, then the kernel - no problem, lastly the nvidia driver - GUILTY. Restore and mark the latter update as never install this version. Bit of a bummer as looking at the release notes there's something in it to address issues with resume from suspend. That's never worked for me and is something I would like to have working.

Google Play to require privacy labels on apps in 2022, almost two years after Apple

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: What I Really Want

Clearly it would not be appropriate to use that setting for a weather app, that does not make the function a bad suggestion.

The gallery app on my phone wants access to my location - why? All I want the gallery app to do is display photos stored on my phone. So it is denied.

The Seek Thermal app demands location, I do not want Seek knowing where I am nor do I want my thermal photos geotagged but I if I block the permission the app will not run. So I use a developer setting to set a false location. But if I need another app to know my location I have to disable that for all applications.

What if another app refused to work if your location looked false? Yeah I'd just uninstall it and manage without whatever function I lost but some people seem unable to do that.

I would like to be able, per app, to set location to:

[x] Deny

[ ] Permit once

[ ] Permit

[ ] Fixed random false location

[ ] Fixed location set by user

[ ] Genuine looking movement in random region

[ ] Used defined path

The last of these would spell out the words 'Fuck off' around the streets of some city I plan to never visit.

Same goes for all other settings that have the potential to be personal data, give me a range of options per application.

The Starship has landed. Latest SpaceX test comes back to Earth without igniting fireballs

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

A pedant notes...

Also on Wednesday, SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 rocket that it has now reused nine times

According to Wikinaccurate the booster used on Wednesday has flown 9 times so it's 'only' been reused 8.

Audacity 'scared and excited' to be bought and brought under Muse Group's roof, promises to stay free and open source

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Best UI @boblongii

Please print your message in 60 point text, wrap it around a stout length of clue-by-4 and take it along to every software house on earth. Apply liberally.

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Insert meme here

Not really. There seems to be a growing swell of vocal opposition to cryptocrap, El Reg is simply reporting another instance and padded the article with other comments.

Personally, I cannot think of a single thing fake gold adds to society. Other than another opportunity for a few to get rich at the expense of others, society was desperately short of these. They should be banned globally just for the carbon footprint.

If you have a QNAP NAS, stop what you're doing right now and install latest updates. Do it before Qlocker gets you

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: "follow the 3-2-1 rule on backups"

That's a good scheme but I would say that as it's the one I used to use. Grandfather, father, son scheme was it called? Too long ago. I do remember it was awfully expensive on tapes at the start as for us each 'tape' was actually 12 DDS3 in a pair of autoloaders. HP were putting vouchers in the tape packs, I and one other at work got a freebie Palm Pilot when that was quite an expensive score.

We added a twist to avoid age related tape failures. I can't remember exact the sequence now but after the initial setup month we'd open a new set of 12 tapes every 4 weeks. The new set got used in the daily group x times, then y more times in a weekly slot on the rota then when it was written as a monthly it was retired. i.e. all monthly backups kept indefinitely. Sure they'd fail eventually but it improved the chance of that failure being outside the 12 months.

Backups on external HDDs are fine so long as you don't use them to archive data. All my data at home going back 30 years is kept on live spinning rust on a RAID5. Offsite backups on external HDDs only need to last as long as the cycle time of the three HDDs.

Archiving to HDD=goodbye data.

Is that... is that a piece of Unikitty? Remembering Skylab via the medium of Lego

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

We bring our Lego My Own Creation (MOC) odyssey to a close today

Woah there not so fast. You cannot possibly consider your odyssey complete until you've built the ISS. In multiple configurations showing at least one delivery vehicle of each type present. And all the construction & service launch vehicles on the pad.

Snap to it.

Wi-Fi devices set to become object sensors by 2024 under planned 802.11bf standard

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Re: Stalker's dream

It's like so many other technologies, keep it in the home and it could be tremendously useful, e.g. automatic light control without needing dedicated sensors in every room.

As soon as you introduce cloud - FO, FRO then when you finished that FRO some more.

Lenovo reveals smart specs that let you eyeball five virtual displays, with strings attached

Gotno iShit Wantno iShit

Mark can't see a use case so the tech is junk?

Mark Pesce, a Reg columnist , VR/AR pioneer and author of Augmented Reality: Unboxing Tech's Next Big Thing, said his first reaction to the device was to ask “Why?

If the 5 screens have to be in your field of view all the time Mark might have a point. If they can be placed anywhere and become visible when you look in user set directions it's a different matter. Working on a car? Have a pdf of the manual floating a head turn away. Working at your desk? Have more screens floating above & around your main screen or look in the direction of your front door to see the CCTV feed of who's just rung the doorbell.

So long as it's all processed locally I'm interested to know more.

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