* Posts by Henry Wertz 1

3282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: [Rust is] the wrong tool for solving the problems that Linux has

Well, the thing is, these big corporations that rely on them continuing to deliver working code are for the most part not paying them. Companies that used to have 5 or 6 big devs now have 1 or 2. So they can try to have a 'Come to Jesus' meeting all they want but, well, if Redhat called me in to tell me to shape up, since they don't pay me I'd probably tell them where to shove it LOL.

US accuses Canadian math prodigy of $65M crypto scheme

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Code is law versus fraud

Yep, the 'code is law' view is interesting. But, it's a matter of... if you use social engineering, 'brain hacks', pig butchering, erc. to get a person to hand over cash, you are defrauding them. Even though they are giving you money fully volintarily. So clearly (at least to me) this is the same. You're not committing theft perhaps but are committing fraiud using this technique to receive funds with smart contracts.

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

assumed it was locked out

i assumed it was locked out, so there was one chance at bootup to load microcode patches (or possibly 2, one for the BIOS and one that SHOULD be used for early boot), then part of the microcode load would be to 'flip a switch' so the capability was disabled unti the cpu was power cycled.

Of course, maybe there is and Google tampered with the 'early boot' update rather than updating microcode a third time later, i didn't look to see the mechanics of their exploit other than it exploiting week MD5 hashes. But the way they talk about ring 0 access this sounds like this capability is left on and they are doing a late microcode update.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: It's not a security vulnerability

Microsoft and others have this fantasy that secureboot and tpm type stuff can let them run stuff on your system that yourself, even as superuser, cannot be privy to. Of course claiming it's for your own good but really for media companies to be able to restrict your use of your own computer. (And so people can theoretically use it on ATMs. slot machines, etc. as yet another layer of security.)

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Windows 12?

I've been using Linux since 1993 so I'm just enjoying this from the sidelines...

But given some people's 'every other Windows version is good' theory (which is a bit naft since if you think 95 was good you'd say 98 is bad and WindowsME was good... and same with NT4, 2000 and XP...). But people use that to explain Vista and Windows 8.

Based on that theory, maybe some who don't like Windows 11 would reconsider if they quickly put out Windows 12 LOL. I'm just kidding of course, but as a Linux user, Microsoft can feel free to do what they want.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I have not had this problem

I haven't had this problem. I run Ubuntu, not Windows on my PCs (so they do update but don't demand it, and don't get flakey and force reboots.). And I am into tech but not at all into so-called 'inteenet of things' so no internet connected toothbrush for me thanks.

Nvidia deprecates CUDA support for aging architectures

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Driver support

Having dealt with reviving one or two machines with out if date nvidia hardware...

You indeed install older drivers. Ubuntu for instance has 470 'legacy' drivers still for stuff that 490 and 5xx drivers no longer support. No longer works with your current kernel? Ubuntu at least has little trouble installing an older kernel, even from a previous Ubuntu release, and running newer userland on top of it.

As for CUDA, Nvidia goes to *some* extremes to let one 'mix and match'. If you're not using unsupported feaatures they actually have compatibility shims to let 'most' Cuda 12 stuff run in Cuda 11 even. My understanding is this is INTENDED for use with those 'enterprise distros' where they are heinously slow to update the kernel series and drivers ('if it aint broke don't fix it') and business/gov't where they have red tape in doing any major software updates. But AFAIK it'd work for this too.

Microsoft builds open source document database on PostgreSQL, suggests FerretDB as front end

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

a) ok at first i thought that link was dumb but it is in fact hilarious. /dev/null indeed.

b). BSON? Gross.

c) As one commenter points out, document management stuff has been around in some industries for decades. I doubt we'd want the same software that an airplane manufacturer uses but it might be good to see what features it has to avoid 'reinveting the wheel', i.e. having something lacking features not because they aren't implemented yet but due to inexperience, not realizing how useful certain features could be.

Crims backdoored the backdoors they supplied to other miscreants. Then the domains lapsed

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Don't get it

Also to notice that activity you have to have a firewall and someone (or some thing) looking at the logs.

Shockingly when I went tio the university here (this was years ago but still, late 90s to early 2000s when they should have known better), THEY just had a flat campus wide ethernet, nothing between buildings, and nothing between buildings and the internet. Every single random desktop had a public IP and nothing filtering, logging irregular traffic, etc. Yes they (other than the computer sciene department, which ran Irix. HP-UX, and Linux systems) would have campus wide failures when those various Windows worms would take everything down.

Boffins carve up C so code can be converted to Rust

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: “Minimal adjustments”

Well, if you look at Rust code it looks pretty C-like. There's C code that would be line-for-line identical in Rust.

There's other C where there's like syntactic differences but it one-to-one coverts.

Then there's C code, where, you know, it's valid to have like an float, or a long (is that 32-bit or 64-bit on your compiler) or a long long (64-bit or 128-bit?) and then go ahead and access it as ints. I imagine there are things like this that don't autoconvert given Rusts stronger guarantees on type safety. I'm sure there's a way to tell Rust "just do it" but that's probably the point where you want to take a look at the code and make sure it'll still do what you intend for it to. Or dealing with threads, where Rust has a way to do it safely, but your C code might need some tweaks to follow the safety model (if your code is indeed thread-safe it probably doesn't need big changes, but you might need to give hints on locking or something so it can ensure the code it converts is safe.)

I'd expect you could have some pretty significant programs that'd convert straight through; code that uses those "corner cases" that C most certainly allows but are hard to ensure safety on would need those manual adjustments.

We’re paying for what we don’t get: East D.C. neighbors frustrated with Amazon’s Prime delivery exclusions

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Delivery estimate

So, indeed, given they have heavy amounts of analytics, which clearly include how long it takes from the time a item is shipped to when it arrives... well, I don't expect them to go to areas if they're going to be robbed or car jacked. Fine. But they *should* be able to point out when an area (both places like east D.C. and to the person in the comments who lives on an island) is not going to get that 1-day delivery. And obviously, showing some shipping estimate that is BS then updating it just after checkout, that is pretty close to fraudulent given their analytics already know how long it's likely to take to deliver.

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

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Don't forget marketing!

Don't forget the marketing! I saw this PC Magazine ( I think?), IBM had bought a I think *50* page ad for OS/2. And like half the pages were "Well it had this bug but it's fixed." Obviously fixing bugs is good, but this is not what you put in when you're paying for advertising to get someone to buy your product LOL. Seriously, though, I used OS2 for a bit in the "OS2 Warp" days, between Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Win95 (I had switched to Linux already by the time Windows 95 came out). But the advertising was awful and I can't imagine anyone ever buying it based on how it was marketed.

Pornhub pulls out of Florida, VPN demand 'surges 1150%'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

But my desktop doesn't have a camera

"For what it's worth, Robin Tombs, boss of Yoti, which provides age checks for blue-movie sites in the US, argued earlier this week that its age confirmation system, using facial analysis, and identity document verification is secure and safe, as you might imagine."

But my desktop doesn't have a camera you insensitive clods! Well, Iowa hasn't gotten there yet.. the nuts in power here are too busy trying to get books banned and take away LBGTQ rights to worry about porn.

What's most maddening about these right-wingers is their constant lying about wanting to reduce government intrusion and restrictions, while in fact wanting to turn the state (and the country) into an "Iran of the west", passing all sorts of religious-hangup-based laws and regulations. As someone who is libertarian at heart and really wants light regulation, it's pretty galling to have these people falsely claim that's what they want when they want the exact opposite.. and that their followers truly have the doublethink to simultaneously support restrictions to people's rights while simultaneously believing these politicians are easing up on restrictions.

How a good business deal made us underestimate BASIC

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Atari BASIC

Atari BASIC was a tad interesting, they actually didn't use Microsoft BASIC at all and wrote their BASIC themselves. It was pretty compatible -- Compute! magazine would have a common listing, then what changed were needed for Atari, PET, etc. which were pretty small.

I do recall people commenting that the divide and (I think?) multiply on it were APPALLINGLY slow, if your program was going to do serious amounts of math it was actually faster apparently to write code in BASIC to do long division (let alone use some optimized assembly). The 6502 didn't have hardware multiply or divide it was all bit shifts and add/subtract internally; apparently it was common to use some tables to speed this up, but they ran low on ROM space and used a smaller but much slower algorithm to shave off some bytes for whatever to use. (This didn't make much practical difference, since MOST software might have a few multiplies or divides, but just all that many that you'd notice a slowdown.)

On the bright side, BAISC didn't support player/missile graphics ("sprites" on other platforms that supported this) or any too exotic use of the very flexible graphics hardware (like changing modes every 2 scan lines and the like) but it did have graphics modes (including the option of having a graphics mode with like 3 or 4 lines of text at the bottom... or full-screen graphics, your choice), plotting, sound support, etc. at least. There were aftermarket BASICs and languages like Action! that were faster and supported more features.

Encryption backdoor debate 'done and dusted,' former White House tech advisor says

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Told it'd happen

Of course, when the feds pushed for these backdoors, they were told exactly this would happen; that with a target that juicy, it WILL be cracked into and used by whoever (China, or Russia, or North Korea, or some organized crime, or some disorganized crime... i.e. random hackers...).

Eutelsat OneWeb blames 366th day for 48-hour date disaster

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

... And that's why

... And that's why you don't roll your own time/date handling code. I'm so glad for the work I do that Python has lovely datetime and timezone libraries to take care of leap days and leap year, daylight savings time, etc. so I don't have to.

Google's 10-year Chromebook lifeline leaves old laptops headed for silicon cemetery

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: 10 years !!!

I know replying twice is odd, but I figured this is almost a seperate topic... driver support for older hardware. As a Linux user since 1993, I began to wonder if Linux was EVER going to drop support for older hardware, I kept seeing ongoing support for stuff I was using when I first started using Linux... well they did drop support for 386 and 486 CPUs but other than that.

So finally, the answer to "will they ever drop driver support" is finally yes -- they're just now dropping support for accelerated graphics on Matrox cards and some other stuff I used in the mid to late 1990s. So, will your hardware be supported forever? Maybe not, but de facto they seem to be finally converging on a roughly 25 year support timeframe before they finally at least ask "Is anyone still using this hardware with a new kernel/distro?" and drop support if the answer is "no". So your hardware definitely has some life left in it LOL.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: 10 years !!!

"I'm not convinced newer stuff at an affordable price is going to be significantly better"

It's not. Don't know if you bought it with 32GB or upgraded, but that's a healthy amount of RAM. Storage... you can get very large HDDs at a good price and get a nice price per GB. Put SSDs have cartel pricing so your newer SSD might be faster but it's not going to be bigger.

CPU-wise... I've ended up with a few systems in that 15-20 year old range as well as a scattering of newer gear. Going from a Core system (like Core 2 Duo or the power-hungry Q6600 Core 2 Quad), Moore's law was still in effect, like a early gen core i3/5/7 that was just a few years newer was a lot faster than the Core 2, Moore's law was on the ropes but it was still probably double every 2 or 3 years back then. Since then... well, an Sandy Bridge (3rd gen), Ivy Bridge (4th Gen), Coffee Lake (8th gen), Tiger Lake (11th gen), between 3rd and 8th gen it's probably a ~50% speedup per core, and 3rd to 11th *maybe* double per core. I mean, my Coffee Lake has 6 cores instead of 4 as well, the 11th gen is a notebook so it's 2C/4T, nice per-core performance but not too powerful multicore. And you've read about the 12th/13th/14th gen... "it's slightly faster... no wait it's a bit slower... oh it's even.. oh actually it's slower... the microcode will make it a little faster.. wait it didn't, or maybe it did..." LOL.

Double is nothing to sneeze at, but for something like 10 years newer it's not a huge difference.. under the "doubling every 18 months" that happened in decades past, you would have had a 64x speedup in 9 years.

Side note, if you ever run into software that DOES need newer instructions (if your CPU is just old enough it may not support AVX2 for instance), check out "Intel SDE" (Software Development Emulator). You run an application under it, and it traps and emulates all missing instructions. I found there to be no discernible slowdown between running a build of some software that doesn't require newer instructions, and a build that uses them so Intel SDE must trap and emulate the missing instructions (i.e., obviously you can't magically get a speedup from instructions your CPU doesn't have, but it seems to break down and emulate them efficiently.. like maybe using 2 older AVX instructions to do an AVX2 instruction... so there's no discernible slowdown from the trap-and-emulate overhead either.)

Interpol wants everyone to stop saying 'pig butchering'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

inaccurate terminology

It'd be nice if they were going to make up a term for something that already has one if they'd pick a term that's accurate,. Romance baiting? I'm not even sure if the most common scenario involves romance. I've read about victims where they just posed as a new friend, no romance involved.

I don't expect the US media at least to change their terminology. After all people don't report 'I was in a pig butchering scam', they describe meeting someone and giving them money over time. I don't see how what term it has affects reporting the crime; and if it did, I would not want to report I was in a romance baiting when there was no romance involved.

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

opposite isssue

I've had the opposite issue... i set to not do anything with my location info and within the last few months google's started to ask me tio review places etc. that make it real clear it decided to do so anyway.

Microsoft goes thin client with $349 Windows 365 Link mini PC

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I wionder what's actually in it?

I wonder what's actually in it? ARM? Some wheezy Celeron thing? Surely not a RISC-V. Not that it matters if they're going to be asshats and lock it down. And given it costs more than just buying a computer. But there was some fun in the distant past booting full oses on Wyse X Terminals (which were later repurposed by Wyse to do Remote Desktop Protocol instead, or capable of both.)

Qualcomm's Windows on Arm push would be great – if only it ran all your software

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Linux on ARM

I'm just biding my time for some used ARM notebooks to show up on the used market at a good price.

I used ARM Linux like 5 years ago on a Chromebook, (model with an Nvidia Tegra K1) and had VERY few non-native apps (after all if Ubuntu didn't have some package i could install a buid for Raspberry Pi). The only thing i ran under emulation was a 'binary blob' samsung printer driver, i assume there was overhead but it could process pages faster than the printer could print them. qemu-system-x86 (and x86-64) didn't work for multithreaded apps, but apparently box86 and box64 do. and are plemty good enough you can just install steam (for x86-64) on there and play your games (probably the only thing you'd have to run under emuilation.). The Ardreno GPU on them is apparently quite good as are the Mesa 3D drivers for it.

Letting chatbots run robots ends as badly as you'd expect

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

3 laws of robotics

It's not like they couldn't be jailbroken and bypassed anyway... but I haven't seen an LLM bestowed with the 1st law of robotics. Maybe they should be, it's possible the llm would deem some responses harmful and avood them if it was actually told to in this direct way.

Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

It's good

I'm a Linux user myself but have a friend who is way into NetBSD,. Indeed it's true. the BSDs have weak support for newer GPUs, Mesa3D, etc, but would be fantastic for a server.

Microsoft throws in the towel on HoloLens 2

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

insecure military hardware?

So they are committed to selling HoloLens to the military but will end security support in 2027? That does seem like a bit of a problem.

Starlink's new satellites emit 30x more radio interference than before, drowning cosmic signals

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

sdr

My guess -- and it is just a guess -- is the designs are leaning more on software definred radios and less on RF filters (which would directly cut out of band emissions.). If you are going to operate in a fixed band you slap on filters. If you want a flexible system the temptation is to leave the RF filters out as miuch as possible.

(This was an issue with ground equipment... the modern 3G/4G/5G cell sites don't usujally have 2 through 5G radios, they have general radios communicating with a computer creating and receiving the 2 through 5G signals in software.). There were 1 or 2 bands of the many used in the US where they found they had to run redujced power in those bands because those radios wouldn't stay tightly enough within those couple bands. In hindsight they probably would have built sites with filters built. but these were already deployed cell sites were new 4G. or 5G bands were turned on in some cases years later.

SpaceX faces $663K FAA fine for Musk's alleged launch impatience

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Ahh they've joined Swarm

Ahh, they've joined the ranks of Swarm -- who in January 2018 proceeded with some satellite launches despite not having the FCC licenses for it. They applied for FCC licenses, they were denied on the basis of the satellites being so small they could not be tracked if they became debris (rather than just making sats physically bigger, it can be possible to make the satellite more reflective so it shows up better visually and on radar). But they did neither one, they went ahead and launched anyway. So this is FAA permits instead, but SpaceX has joined those hallowed ranks of unpermitted launches.

Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Pager security measures

Yes, none of the pager standards have any encryption whatsoever. And in the modern area, you can get some models of USB TV tuner, run it as an SDR (Software Defined Radio) which is not using the actual TV decoder part of it at all, and watch any pages come through if there's still any pager system whatsoever in your area.

Equipment cost, about $15 (well, maybe $30, electronics costs have gone up the last year or two) for the USB tuner and $0 for the software (and whatever for the computer, this is somewhat but not too much CPU-intensive so if you really don't have a random Linux box sitting around... I suppose you "could" use Windows but I don't recommend anyone use that... then a Raspberry Pi would have enough muscle to do this.)

FCC boss starts bringing up Musk's Starlink dominance, antitrust concerns

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Still some chance

Yeah, in general on FCC licenses, the deployment requirements are to prevent spectrum squatting. Company would buy a license, build nothing and hold onto it until they could sell it at a higher price to someone else. The maximum penalty is having your license revoked, it goes back to the FCC for reauctioning.

But in reality, they do consider both

a) Intent. If company either launches nothing, or run out of funds and quit launching anything before they have a functional service, they might get that license revoked. In this case, the schedule's slipped and they have sats all scheduled up to build and launch starting toward the end of the year.

b) Demand. If there's not other companies planning to build another satellite constellation that want that spectrum and orbital slots, then revoking the licenses and reauctioning them would be kind of a moot point.

Just an odd side note -- Dish network's current 5G network (they never had 1G-4G..), several bands it uses were originally auctioned for 1-way pagers and the like, WAAAAY after pagers went obsolete. Charlie Eigen (head of Dish Network) is a shrewd businessman.. The FCC continued to auction off these chunks of 2-way spectrum that the cell phone companies would bid up, then another bit for 1-way use. Dish would buy the 1-way licenses up for almost nothing since pagers were long gone (and the ones that were left could continue using the band they already used.). Some of these had no buildout requirement; some did, but with 0 demand for pagers they'd persuade the FCC to not bother revoking those ones. Then Charlie got FCC permission to drop the "1-way" requirement so it's now used in their 5G network.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Natural monopoly

This sounds like a natural monopoly to me. In a natural monopoly, there are high costs to entering a market, and the size of the market is sometimes not that large. So it's that much harder for new entrants to enter the market. Not impossible, just more difficult so you tend to have fewer if not a monopoly then fewer competitors.

The standard practices in an illegal monopoly... before Standard Oil was broken up (the Sherman antitrust act was basically written originally to break up Standard Oil, who was very anticompetitive.) Two common practices they had to maintain their monopoly was to drop prices in an area with a new entrant to below costs to put the competitor out of business, then jack prices back up. And order capacity on trains, pipelines (if they had them that long ago), etc., EVEN if they weren't planning to use it, to prevent competitors from getting access to transportation for their oil.

They just got going launching their constellation first, and have been launching 'em at a rapid clip, so they have the most satellites and customers. Using the "Standard Oil" tests, they're bringing in $6.6 billion a year in revenue from a constellation they expect to cost $10 billion total to build (the $10 billion was from 2018 so this is probably higher, but still..), so I imagine they're turning a tidy profit (they're not selling below cost to lock out competitors.) And these constellations are all using different altitudes etc. so they aren't taking up orbital slots etc. that competitors need to operate in; Amazon's getting launch capacity from SpaceX so they aren't being anticompetitive by not selling launch capacity to their competitors.

That said -- it's certainly worth the FCC looking in to. It makes sense to take a look at anyone that has like 60, 70% of a market. I don't think they'll find anything, but they can let competitors make comments and see if there is anything worth looking into.

Japan to put a small red Swedish house on the Moon

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: the idea was more than 25 years old, but he started working on it more seriously around 2002

i suppose petitioning whatevcer space agencies are sending anything to the moon to take his payload.

But agreed, I hope he was not using some large percentage of his time on it lol.

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Moore's law and SSDs

One reason I could see putting off upgrades -- Moore's law (doubling in performance every 18 months, or same perfromance for half the cost) has been off the table for years. It's more like 3-5 years now. Most peoples computers are fast enough for what they use them for and buying a new one won't get this massive performance boost like it would have 15 or 20 years ago.

Second, SSDs. They're lovely but the price per GB is not. When one may have an older system with like a 750GB HDD and see the comparable new system has a 256GB SSD? It doesn't look like an upgrade.

Despite cyberattacks, water security standards remain a pipe dream

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

scada in general

scada systems in general are not secure from what i've read,. i mean some are obsolete but it's like the CAN bus on autos. security was no priority since these systems are not inended to be reachable from the internet.

That's the solution here, at least short to medium term. (Long term new powrr pleants, water treatment plants, etc. shoiuld have secure systems and standards to use). short and mid term, strong use of vpns and access controls. if there's any access outside a vlan. do not allow direct access, run it through something to sanitize requests (if i's to monitor stuff don't even allow other commands through) and make very sure that part is secure.

At least the reports i saw of earlier breakins. it's not like they truly hacked into a remote system. they'd find open ports and even publically accessible remote desktips (vnc or the like) . I think some facilities are properly locked down tight. So juist some best practices for the rest to implement in order to keep the "keep these systems off the public internet" systems off the public internet would go a long ways toward securing things.

AI's thirst for water is alarming, but may solve itself

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

evaporative cooling?

evaporative cooling? In DC? I'm surprised, swamp coolers don't work worth a damn when it's humid out, Which it often is in DC,. In Arizona etc. where it's like 10% humidity they work great (but you are in a desert so it'd use too much water for a data center I would think.). I mean obviously it must work since they're using it, I'm just surprised it does.

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I use it daily.

So in command line linux, you can hit control-alt-F1 through F7 (usually. this is distro specific) to get 7 text consoles? Screen lets you do that,.

I use it daily. One konsole to switch between numerous text screens. (so i can hit control-a 0 to go to one with top running, control-a n and control-a p go to next and previous screens, etc.) Ssh in somewhere and have more than one screen. and if connection drops, ssh back in and resume my screen session.

I actually bought a surplus VT102 many years ago (when i was in high school) and had it in the basement -- my keyboard would keep my parents up so i could go down there and use the VT102 (hooked with a long serial cable) to continue using my computer. This was mid 1990s so I did not have a large amount of graphical apps I wanted to use, my 4MB system didn't have enough RAM to run most of them anyway.

Telegram CEO was 'too free' on content moderation, says Russian minister

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

So...

So... were France's requests valid requests under the DSA? Or did they just request info outside the EU regulatiobs?

Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Nice

I'm still using a IBM Model M keyboard myself, bit I liked the Microsoft mice I used and the keyboards were decent too. Glad to see they'll continue being made.

EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I'd do a plugin hybrid

I'd do a plugin hybrid. My Chevy Cruze gets 40 MPG (us, 48 uk mpg or 5.88 L/100km... and has a 16 gallon tank. so on a road trip with thaty 640 mile fuel range i can pick out the cheapest gas stations.). And then I can fuel it up in like 2 minutes and keep going.

I don't want to have to wait in line to spend 45 minutes charging. Or plan my routes around available charging points.

But I have a 120V outlet next to my driveway. so i could put 10 or 20 miles range into a plugin hybrid overnightt, plenty for driving aroind town, and just gas up on road trips. I conserterd getting a Volt when I got my Cruze but the used Volts wrre selling for about what they cost brand new, like 3x the cost i got the Cruze for. But when I look at a next vehicle I'll certainly cobsider a plugin hybrid.

A quick guide to tool-calling in large language models

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Hello Skynet

Hello Skynet. I mean I'm mostly tongue in cheek here but hooking AIs into various APIs does sound like it'd give a nefarious rogue AI a hand up.

In all seriousness the example is great to show how this works and I can see these being quite useful.

Zuckerberg admits Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yes

Yes I'm sure the Biden administration did lean on Zuckerberg etc. to remove dangerous misinformation.

I'm torn -- on the one hand the 1st ammendment fully applies, and if it came to it I think the Biden administration couldn't have required them to do anything.

On the other hand, so many people thinlk if they read something more than once on Facebook that means it's factual. The anti vax and anti mask nonsesne definitely lead to a lot of deaths.

It'd be great if there was some easy way for people to tell when something is backed up by facts and science; when something is unsubstantiated (no strong basis to say it's true but not necessarily false); and when something is a big load of nonsense someone made up and just gets repeated echo chamber style.

Intel's Software Guard Extensions broken? Don't panic

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

No 4K Bluray for you!

I'm not sure how much SGX was used for other than that. The rights restriction systems in commercial Bluray player software uses SGX to lock down 4K playback apparently. So you upgrade to 11th gen or newer CPU and you'll just have to use unofficial software and rip your blurays to play them.

gcc supports it but it sure looked complicated to use, like you have to install 20 to 30 Intel supplied packages to have the SDK and tooling they used to make using SGX in your application work.

Feds, US states sue RealPage for building rent-hiking software for landlords

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

antitrust

As much as I"m not a fan of Nutjob Trump, I don"t think that"d have any bearing on a DOJ antitrust decision. That antitrust decision (not stopping two companies from merging) has zero bearing on the legality of the service they are providing. They would literally be deciding on if the merger of these two companies unduly reduced competition in the market they are in.

Buying a PC for local AI? These are the specs that actually matter

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

can't stress vram enough

Can't stress vram enough,. Messing about with this stuff, more ram bandwidth and tops might let it run faster. But not having enough vram keeps models from runnibg at all (without just running on cpu instead.)

I've found my GTX1650 to be rather ineffective since many models need more than 4GB VRAM no matter how you slice it. (you can run highlyt quantisized but running the text ones that qiuantisized. they get stupid and halliucinate.. well more than normal,. Image gen is right out,

'Luckily' since the GTX1650 doesn't have Tensor untils and whatever to make models run extra fast, and my coffee lake cpu is reassonable. it's 'only' about 10x the performancer of just letting the CPU do it. Just playing, i don't care if a text response takes 5 or 10 seconds or an image takjes like 90 seconds instead of about 10 on gpu (with the one set of settings that made that model 'small' enough to run on the GPU at all.)

Gamers who find Ryzen 9000s disappointingly slow are testing it wrong, says AMD

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Longevity

It's nice that AMD gives rheir sockets some longevitiy. Back in the day I used socket 7 for many years, and socket A (athlon/duron) socket. it was nice to be able to pop in a newer cpu, not find out the socket had been changed 2 or 3 times in the interim.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Re: Software Optimization...

You can have workloads optimized for your specific CPU right now if you want. It's called Gentoo.

I use Ubuntu now but used Gentoo for a good number of years. Every package compiled for the specific CPU it's running on.

Texas Instruments calculates its US CHIPS Act winnings at $1.6B

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Mature processes

Just to note, you can sometimes die shrink a dersign by 'one process' of improvement or so tor enlarge by 1 or 2 sometimes) but that's about it,. And for analog circuitry maybe not even that. So these shortages of 65nm chips etc, a while back, even if the capacoty had been there they couldn't ne fabbled at 28nm or like 14 or 7nm instead,

Shots fired as AT&T and Verizon ask FCC to block Starlink's direct-to-cell plans

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

No trial basis needed

No trial basis needed, AT&T and Verizom presented calculations indicating an 18% reduction in throughput on the PCS C band that at the out of band emission levels Starlink proposes. If Starlink or T-Mo owned it nationwide there"d be no issue but they don't. They probably do own PCS C in some areas but it's lt's licensed to other cell cos in others.

IRS has loads of legacy IT, still has no firm plans to replace it

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

PC Blades?

"I suspect the IRS may still be running 1000s of ancient PC blades as web servers for different application purposes, with no re-engineering and no doubling up of apps per server. Its easier to manage even if they are idle for 99% of the time."

Maybe on their most modern stuff.

"I was thinking a cluster of GE645s running Multics. ;)"

When I talked to someone about 15 years ago (who retired from the IRS and was working at the NSA Cryptologic Museum -- which is fascinating BTW), they had something like 7 different terminals on each desk (you get to anything weirder and older than an IBM 3270 and you aren't going to find a PC emulator, and possibly no way electrically to even get it onto an ethernet to connect to the PCs they undoubtedly also had on their desks).

They still were running a Univac. I do believe they may have even had Multics in the mix. They were working to reduce the number of terminals at that point from 7 to 4. The guy at the museum was SHOCKED (at my knowledge of old systems) when he said he worked on a Unisys system and I asked if it was a Sperry or Burroughs based one.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Cutting costs through upgrades? Please

Cutting costs through upgrades? Please.

On the one hand, having systems that you can't get parts for any more, there's no plan to at least virtualize/emulate them on more modern hardware, that's a problem. Or the software is in a truly dead language (if they ever need to make changes to it.)

On the other hand, the computers are bought and paid for, the software is mature and presumably they've either worked out the bugs, or documented them, or have procedures to avoid them. It is NOT going to magically save costs to spend a bunch of money "modernizing" these systems, if the goal is to reduce IT spend that is not the way to do it.

Raptor Lake microcode limits Intel chips to a mere 1.55 volts to prevent CPU destruction

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

1.9v

I read some of these CPUS were hitting 1.9v. So dropping to 1.55V is quite a drop. That said this tends to be one of those curves where you hit some speed and start seriously cranking the voltage to get a small increase (i. e. you don't lose 1/4 of your speed if you drop voltage by 1/4.)

So. This backfired but I kind of assume the plan was to ship these with VERY aggressive settings..get high benchmarks from reviewers to say they beat AMD.. then lower it, and hope the places that review CPUs don't go through and retest the CPUs at their realistic, stable settings. I imagine they didn't count on the chips getting permanent damage from this.