Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Apple's last tower topples… and the others will follow

Honestly the current Mac Pro was kind of a joke. Same CPU as some Mac Studio model that was like half the price. RAM is soldered on so that's no advantage of the tower. It's got storage bays, but nothing to do with them since the storage is soldered on and no SATA or M.2 slots. The PCIe slots are there, but almost useless in macOS (since you need macOS ARM drivers and there just aren't that many of them. I will note, if you throw Asahi Linux on one of these, the PCIe is fully useable, since the Linux drivers are portable including to ARM systems. Even apparently the unnatural combinatoin of ARM CPU + Intel ARC GPU.) Apparently the one advantage of the tower is it's SLIGHTLY faster under extended full load operation (due to better thermals), but for the $1,000s in price difference once could have likely just pointed a fan at the Studio to make that up too.

To me this article is pure Apple fanboi'ism... like... Apple makes non-expandable systems, therefore everyone will switch to this.

There's those "Chromebook-based" systems where they've got some wheezy bit of RAM and SSD (sometimes a nice slow eMMC) soldered on, of course. But Intel has now announced "Lunar Lake" (which had RAM integrated on the CPU) is a one-off and they are not doing that any more, so that appeared to be a sign of this kind of trend, but Intels stepped back from doing this.. Anecdotal of course, but my mom got a notebok for $218 new recently (due to RAMpocalypse it now costs about $250). I really assumed (since one of the vaunted reasons for soldering on is to save the cost of the DIMM and M.2 slots) that it'd be a Chromebook-style board with everything soldered on. Nope! There's an access hatch at the bottom of the case, and it's using conventional DIMMs and M.2.

I don't see notebooks going all to "let's just solder it all on"; and desktops I DEFINITELY don't see this even starting to be a trend outside the Apple world other than perhaps the smallest systems (the ones that are basically a laptop motherboard just in a little brick-shaped case with no screen or keyboard rather than a flat 'case' with a keyboard and LCD built on). Any suggesting of SERVERS doing this is kind of a joke IMHO.

I do have a thunderbolt port or two on my desktop... but, I've never used it. Nothing against Thunderbolt, it IS amazing technlology. But, I added additional USB3 connectivity using a PCIe card, GPU via PCIe card. If I filled my M.2 slots I could add a card to add more M.2 storage too (although, to be honest, I have the vast majority of my storage in the form of spinning rust. I mean, 24TB of storage for maybe ~$400 over the last several years, even pre-RAMpocalyipse something like $2000-$3000 in SSD storage and now probably closer to the $4000-$6000 range.). In that vein I could also use those PCIe slots to pop more SATA ports for even more disk storage LOL.

Re: I have to admit…

Yeah the Mac Pro towers (the one made up through 2013) was impressive. Lots of RAM expandability, lots of storage expandability, and plenty of PCIe slots. The modern one looks like the old one, but the RAM is soldered, storage is soldered, it inexplicably has all these storage bays, but no way to actually hook them up to anything. And the PCIe slots, but there are VERY few PCIe ARM drivers for macOS. (But, if you put Asahi Linux on there, well, PCIe is PCIe so almost anything that'd work on any PC will work in there. Even the unnatural combination of ARM CPU + Intel ARC GPU.)

Big moves in Linux filesystems as new bcachefs lands and KDE adds support for Apple's APFS

Re: Do one thing and do it well

There are some that have done that. bcachefs is intentionally designed to have a bunch of advanced features, the likes of btrfs (but not so buggy) or ZFS.

At home I actually do use a layered approach -- I've got some data volumes with ext4 to store the actual data (since it's so good at it), and s3ql filesystem layered on top, providing deduplication and compression (which it does very well.) s3ql is designed to be able to store your data in a block object store, but also allows pointing it at a local directory and it stores the blocks in there instead, so that's what I do. Nice thing is it's *very* POSIX compliant -- I can run a VirtualBox VM off it, put the steam library on there, put source code in there and build out of it, etc....Also I do run filesystem backups of my other systems into one, the deduplication saves a lot there of course. Some of those fuse filesystems are pretty restricted, this one implements everything; it even supports extended attributes (but not ACLs -- access control lists -- I think for security reasons, they are actually filtered out in the code.)

Re: btrfs vs bcachefs

Just had to second this. I've used btrfs several times in the past -- the first time I lost data. The second, third, and fourth times, the filesystem went read-only. No problem, I'll run fsck! No fsck. Every. Single. Time. this enthusiastic btrfs fan base insisted it was totally stable (as long as you didn't use a few odd bits of functionality like RAID-10, I was running a single disk so no problem) and I think the LONGEST I had it not blow up was about a week. IF you have perfectly reliable hardware, it might be reliable... but pull the power at the wrong moment and you're SOL. Oh I also ran it in a VM last year, since OpenSuse defaulted to it... after one unclean VM shutdown it blew out there too.

And yes, there was some kind of drama. It really looked like it amounted to the Linux FS devs being concerned bcachefs would be all unstable like btrfs, and they'd have to deal with the fallout for years, the numbers of devs at Redhat etc. working on this is now VERY small. The conversation got heated, there were even accusations of Kent bringing in people to the discussion to try to push things his way; to be fair, from what I saw the kernel devs were doing so to (getting people from outside the filesystem dev to throw down.) Ultimately, the final straw was making too extensive of code changes during the kernel release candidate phase.

Frankly, I don't have a side on this but I could see both sides point -- Kent's filesystem is well designed, and already in better shape than btrfs was for years (... and probably better shape than it is now.) On the other hand, throwing in big code patches during RC and all that, that just doesn't work.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Interesting!

Very interesting!

Two points...

A) I took some classes with Professor Jones, graduated in 2001. It's interesting to see he has a fairly complete treatise on trinary logic.

B) In case anyone wondered what a balanced trinary computer is... it has the values represent -1, 0, and 1. It's entirely possible (and Douglas Jones' paper discusses this) having the 3 values be 0, 1, and 2 instead.

Ohio citizens tell hyperscalers to take their supersized datacenters elsewhere

No NDAs

The council, and anyone else, should also not be able to sign NDAs (or, well, if they sign it it should be 100% unenforceable), since zoning for something like this is a public process. Not a 'public' process where the information on WHAT is being built is locked away under NDA. I can guarantee if I had cash to burn, and decided I wanted to build... something... I wouldn't be able to just foist an NDA so nobody finds out what it is until ground is broken. Why should datacenter builders get to do this?

Not wrong

They're not wrong. I mean, I live in Iowa and *I* consider Ohio a drive-through state.

Systemd 260 kills SysV, tells AI not to misbehave

Remove rc.local? NOOOO....

Remove rc.local? NOOOO....

To be honest this could make some Ubuntu upgrades messy... I've got a few systems that have been upgraded from like Ubuntu 12 to 14 to 16 to 18 to 20 to 22 to 24 believe it or not. Is there still some random cruft on there using sysv init scripts? I have no idea, I didn't look to see if it migrated everything to systemd service files or not.

As for removing rc.local... I suppose I can add a service back in to add it back in. But why even remove it? Just disable it by default if they want. What are they saving, like 1KB? I have some miscellaneous tweaks (some settings get set in sysctl.conf, and the ones that aren't settable through sysctl, I've been setting in /etc/rc.local). It's a convenient place to stick some miscellaneous stuff you want to run at startup, but it's not a daemon where it makes sense to use a service file. (I almost called the daemon a service -- this is not Windows, I'll use proper UNIX terminology.)

"systemd is how I'd envisage Microsoft making a Linux-like operating system."

Indeed. I'm not QUITE bothered by it enough to get a "non -systemd" distro. It does work well enough, but I really don't like how it tentacles through the system, and from an aesthetic standpoint I'm very troubled by the unusual system requirements (why should a program that just starts up daemons and processes, plus the other basic functions it's tentacled it's way into taking over, have any particular kernel requirement? Not that someone is going to want to run systemd 260 on like a 2.6 kernel or whatever, but why shouldn't it be able to? Why a 5.5 minimum and 6.6 for full functionality?) The zeal to intentionally NOT do things the UNIX way is bothersome too; in some cases it really seems like they are just doing things their own way to do things their own way (i.e. no improvement in reliability, performance, or system complexity... in terms of troubleshooting, replacing a "does one thing and does it well" utility with yet more code in systemd doesn't help there.)

You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief

Gotta be honest

Gotta be honest, I'm assuming you need physical access, and probably non-standard (or some military/aviation standard) connector rather than USB (possibly RS-232 serial on it's own connector, or possibly something else). But I doubt there's any security at all past that point, that there's no 'jailbreak' in the IPhone sense, just loading your own software on there. ... Which is still going to be difficult due to lack of source code. But I doubt they've locked it down like Apple to actively prevent doing anything with the software.

Copilot spills the beans, summarizing emails it's not supposed to read

What protection policies?

What troubles me the most about this is the flunky from Microsoft saying: "...While our access controls and data protection policies remained intact..."

If items marked confidential are not being treated confidentially, all the time, well, what policies does Microsoft even have to claim their policies remained intact?

Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder

Re: Its why

"Also take a look at YouTube. Some folks did testing a while back and discovered if you use ublock origin to block all ads on YouTube, youtube then purposely make it load pages slower."

...on Chrome. I do exactly that on Firefox and I have not gotten this slowdown.

Tech employees demand their leaders take a stand against ICE

Re: CSuite are doing the right thing

AC that said "I would say no simply because a CEO and by extension the business should be apolitical, you don't start a business as a gateway into politics, you start a business because you're passionate about what your business does..."

I actually agree with you. I don't know why you got voted down so much. I really don't mind people pressuring the CEOs being to speak out on this, and perhaps they should. But honestly, if I ran a business, I'd still have my own political views but the widget business is for making the best widgets possible. As CEO or business owner or whatever, I'd make statements about the business.

UK trade department put civil servants' feelings first during Windows 11 migration

"They missed the "just leave things alone and stop fucking with the user interface for five god damn minutes" category."

Yup my dad's in that category. He was VERY pleased when I replaced his -- I kid you not -- Core 2 Quad Q6600 about 2 years ago with a Coffee Lake system. The Core 2 Quad shockingly still ran Ubuntu 22.04 fine -- nothing was quite snappy but nothing was particularly slow either. (This is not a fast CPU, it was using ~200% CPU usage to play youtube videos. But it did it smoothly. And Zoom conferences several times a week -- I do wonder if it wasn't the oldest system on Zoom? -- and scanning and printing, and editing multi-100 page documents full of graphs and charts. He researches skin lipids, retired but still consulting, thus the large documents and frequent Zoom conferences.)

He assumed it was going to be like his pre-retirement upgrades at the university where he'd have a different user interface, have to reinstall his applications, and generally configure thins to meet his requirements. But his old desktop had a much newer disk in it, so I simply moved the disk over to his newer computer, so literally nothing changed except it ran faster. I have it using "gnome session flashback", designed to closely resemble the ~2012-era Ubuntu desktop. There's no reason to change the desktop environment since he's used to it, so I didn't. If this desktop environment were ever dropped, I'd go for either Linux Mint's MATE desktop, or KDE.

But, it is lovely to have the desktop environment and the OS uncoupled so I can upgrade an OS while keeping a very similar desktop environment if I wish to.

(Side note -- this darned RAM pricing. We bought one of these Coffee Lakes for my Dad, and one for myself, at a pretty good price. No disk installed but otherwise complete, with 32GB DDR4. At current pricing, the RAM is worth more than I paid for the entire system. I joked if they ever needed quick cash they could just pop 16GB out of there. His previous system had 4GB and didn't slow down from lack of RAM, so for real the faster CPU is great but the 32GB RAM is excess for what he uses it for.)

Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours during bad night for North American infra

Resolved but not resolved

Well, the resolved but not resolved is probably easy to explain.

In decades past (well before cloudy services) if an E-Mail system had a wobble, you'd have this ever-increasing queue of E-Mail building up in the outgoing queue (if mail sending was hosed) and incoming queue (if incoming was hosed), waiting for the MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) to process. I don't see why it would be any different now.

Microsoft probably had their problem resolved when they said it was. But some users probably had a giant queue for those systems to work through. There's also the possibility that the queues filled and E-Mails bounced. If the system indicates permanent failure, the E-Mail failed to send. If it indicates temporary failure, it's not really standardized but bulk mail/spam systems typically don't retry, while most others attempt to resend the E-Mail some hours later.

Tesla Full Self Driving subscription to rise alongside its capabilities

Lower used pricing?

I mean, I'm never going to buy a Tesla, let alone a used one. But I would expect having that $8,000 already paid for FSD would be a nice bonus on selling the vehicle used. Having a $99 subscription available, not so much. I do wonder how much this will reduce used value of these vehicles.

Re: I wonder…

I mean I saw someone using it on a local street. (This is in the US so cars drive on the right side of the road.) It turned right onto the street, kept turning right until it hopped the curb and was on the sidewalk, then the driver realized it was going off the rails and grabbed the steering wheel, jerked it back onto the road.

Feds totally skipping infosec industry's biggest conference this year

CISA employees reassigned

I really don't know how many people are left at CISA. In one of many ridiculous moves, the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) reassigned a bunch of people from CISA to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection). This was around October 2025. They were essentially told if they refused reassignment they would be fired.

To be honest, it sounds ridiculous. When I read about this I couldn't help picturing like Dilbert and Wally, and those dudes from the IT Crowd, being handed uniforms and weapons and told to have at it. Besides ICE and CBP certainly not needing even more troops, I seriously doubt the effectiveness of sending security researchers out into the field to jackboot their way through these cities.

Anyway, there is the distinct possibility there's nobody left at CISA to send to the RSA Conference.

Bill Gates-backed startup aims to revive Moore's Law with optical transistors

Re: Epstein

I mean, I don't like Trump. At all. Terrible personality, terrible policies, and as much as his supporters like to deny it, he's a fascist. And a misogynist. But I don't see how you got from point A to point B here.

I mean unless he got syphilis back then and just never got it treated (syphilis causes dementia-like symptoms if it's untreated for 20 or 30 years). The US medical system has major problems, but I seriously doubt someone who "may not be actually be a wealthy person but plays one on TV" would manage to never make it to a VD clinic for decades.

Hacker taps Raspberry Pi to turn Wi-Fi signals into wall art

Re: cool

P25 (US) and Tetra (Europe) support encryption, and it's frequently used. But both are just digital trunked radio. Definitely not invisible, you could certainly pick up police vehicles by their RF emissions. And often times the radios are set to regularly transmit location info -- which even if it's encrypted does mean the vehicles regularly transmit so triangulation would work (as opposed to the possibility of someone's vehicle being invisible because they are not keying up the radio to say anything; or having to rely on picking up oscillator noise from the radios like the gents driving the TV fee enforcement vans do (or so I've gathered, they don't have that here in the States.))

GNOME dev gives fans of Linux's middle-click paste the middle finger

Re: Glad I'm using KDE, and keep your hands off Firefox!

>On KDE, one can also easily assign shortcuts (such as Meta+Z / Meta+Shift+Z) to select the next / previous item in the clipboard history.

No kidding. That might be worth trying out!

Re: This behaviour has ALWAYS been configurable

"But this so-called "developer" probably hasn't heard of xmodmap."

*x*modmap? Oh you know Wayland will have none of that. (But seriously, I agree with you -- if one really does want that middle mouse button to be a useless lump instead of having a fast and convient way to cut and paste, then configure it that way if you really want to.)

Glad I'm using KDE, and keep your hands off Firefox!

Title says it -- this change to Gnome makes me glad I use KDE. And keep your hands off Firefox! Who the crap cares if select and middle-click is "discoverable". It's great! Like, why would I usually select text? To copy it. What do you do with text you've selected? Paste it. So why should I have to pick "copy" off a menu, then "paste" off a second menu -- so clunky! But it's there if you want. Also, what is the point, are they planning to use the middle-click for something else? No? So then why just have a dead mouse button.

Also, not that I've had reason too very often, but a handful of times I've had cases where it was convenient to have two different things to paste. So I could middle-click to paste one, and do the clunky paste (or press control-V) to paste the other.

Garmin autopilot lands small aircraft without human assistance

Re: Instrument landing sysyems (ILS)...

Actually no, the ILS (Instrument Landing System) uses radio navigation beacons (RNAVs) as waypoints, and additional radio hardware at an ILS equipped runway. There are now "GPS RNAVs" that are just a GPS coordinate on the map but generally RNAVs are $100,000s of physical hardware.

I think that's what happened; it was prudent to let it run, they would already have been incapacitated very quickly if their oxygen masks didn't work, and possibly were for a minute or two even when they put the masks on (depending on how fast the plane depressurized), I imagine by ground level if the thing had started acted squirrely they would have taken back over.

Agreed

Absolutely agreed. I haven't experienced hypoxia myself (as far as I know) but you don't start feeliing drowsy or anything, you just lose cognitive ability without realizing it. The air masks probably worked but it's prudent to assume they didn't.

Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat

-Os?

I wonder how much of a slowdown you'd get from a system compiled with -Os? Apparently this can save 25-50% on the size of the executable, and I do wonder if memory allocation could have plenty of padding and 'bubbles' in it when programs are making many smaller allocations rather than a few large ones.

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

What I would do...

Having used C, C++, and Rust (I prefer Python myself, but even there you end up with a fair number of addons that wrap a C implementation of it), you can have simple C code where you replace the #include lines with mod or !include equivalents, and it's one for one the same. It's really like using C with "maximum paranoid" compiler flags (that error out on anything questionable) and like a paranoid Lint that runs at compile-time, with restrictions on pointer usage and other things that lead to memory use errors.

If I were converting C code to Rust, I would first write some code that handles simple cases, and flags code it can't handle automatically. Handle more of those cases. Find the ones it can't handle and handle more. There will be some cases where the code is doing something questionable, a human will have to intervene and fix something up (or you can give the AI a go and see if it helps out). If you want to use AI to iterate this code development so be it, but you then end up with an actual toolchain tool that converts one code to another predictably, versus an AI where you might give it the same task twice and get different results.

Doing an actual code review would be better, but I think converting 'simple' code with a tool and then manually reviewing the rest you could get through many lines of code without just having an AI like Vibe code it for you (with the inevitable unpredictable results.)

Google Antigravity vibe-codes user's entire drive out of existence

Coding error

Given they did not know how to code, I imagine if they had left turbo mode off, they still would not have caught the error and would have still wiped the D drive. I mean, if it printed up "DEL /s D:\*.*' it'd be pretty obvious that's not what you want. But if you've got some Python code (for instance) and they aren't a programmer it'd be very easy to miss that it didn't change the working directory (or the working directory had a typo so it *intened* to change directories but didn't), something like that.

If someone is having an assistant write some functions or code fragments, taking a look at them to integrate into a program.. have at it. But if one doesn't know anything about programming, I would seriously recommend setting up a test environment to run it in. I.e. run a VM, copy some pics in, the program would have still deleted the wrong files (probably) but then one can just roll back to a pristine snapshot.

I'll just say.. I've toyed with having an LLM write code. It was passable but not outstanding, and generally needed a little work (which I fixed myself rather than trying to like iteratively prompt it to fix whatever). But vibe coding (where someone who knows nothing at all about coding just 'vibes along' and lets the LLM write everything?) Total madness. The quality of code made is just too hit-and-miss, and all too often non-progammers are not going to be precise enough in requesting what they want it to do, leaving it free to do something unexpected even if it strictly follows the parameters it was given in it's prompt.

Microsoft appears to move on from its most loyal ‘customers’ – Contoso and Fabrikam

Are they retired?

Are Fabrikam etc. really retired thouigh? Maybe zava will be used JUST for AI nonsense, so when the AI bubble pops (not like there'll be 0 AI, but less than the AI vendors are hoping for), when that happens fabrikam ans coseco can carry on with examples of how to do normal stiff while Zava chases the next fad.

EU regulations?

EU regulations? About using a new company name in their tutorials and tech demos? Admittedly I'm rather libertarian but... I'm not a Microsoft fan but that does not seem necessary to regulate.

Software engineer reveals the dirty little secret about AI coding assistants: They don't save much time

Re: Or waste weeks

Me to! Jusr as you say, the 'flirst draft' of this code worked, i asked for some tweaks, it's like 'well i really should use this tool instead' then wrote up code using a differnt tool that (per the docs) apparently would never work (the new tool it switched to physically won't do what i want.)

Re: circular lists...

You'll see ring buffers in some Linux drivers, since the hardware will use ring buffers (ethernet or wifi putting packets in a ring buffer, sound card audio in one) and some video cards used to have ring bufffers for the command buffer (i. e. 2D or 3D draw commands.)

AI isn't throttling HPC. It is HPC

spot on

spot on really. Heavy RAM requirements? Check. Heavy storage requirements? Check. High speed interconnects? Check. And I'll note the newer supercomputers have (almost if not entirely) moved toward having GPUs available for compute. One can argue semantics but these AI clusters have very much in common with the traditional HPC builds.

Perhaps once the AI bubble bursts (I don't think AI will become irrelevant or anything, but really AI in your fridge and etc? Really...) some of these will be repurposed for high speed compute.

Rideshare giant moves 200 Macs out of the cloud, saves $2.4 million

Re: I had to laugh

'I would have thought a cross build environment would be possible - at least under Darwin but only ever compiled Unix text/terminal code on a Mac so I am only guessing.'

Yoiu'd think so wouldn't you? Franly, I would guess distcc or something could do exactly this, but, ither than OCLP (Opencore Legacy Patcher) and associtated projects, I just haven't seen macos users pushing the envelope, i think the kind who would justr use gentoo or arch etc. instead and simply steer clear of Macs. I would love to develop without a macos vm (I'm not about to buy the physical hardware) but found it to not even be something peiple pursue. I mean visual studio code has a thing for it but it literally just connects to xcode over some remote procedure call or socket or something, not move any work off the Mac.

Re: Multi-user?

I' run my iMac with several different accounts, does anyone know if you can use multi GUI users on the same remote machine?'

Yes, but their absurd licensing makes it so EACH user must pay for 24 consecutive hours at a time. (You may still see some clioud provuders offering macOS instances of much older macOiS instances, this is partly because these terms to put the screws on virtualized users kicked in aboout 5 years ago, probably in resoponse to this very type of use where peoole may have only had to pay for a few minutes of use at a time otherwise.)

Re: "it was a no-brainer"

'What is a no-brainer is buying a properly configured desktop case. Hell, even RAM doesn't cost all that much these days. l

a) These are Macs. RAM is quite costly. Nonexpandable so you can't just buy afternarket RAM.

b) Have you oriced RAM recently? Spot pice has hit about as high as it was back in 2010. Pricing is downright dystopian.

(This doesn't negate your point though.)

O2 cranks prices mid-contract, essentially telling customers to like it or lump it

Re: Cancel and keep the phone?

Yeah that's how they do it here in the states too. Used to get a phone 'included' with the contract on the postpaid phone service, as companies moved away from this (a stealth price increase, same cost service but no 'included' phone), a few companies THOUGHT they would just make you pay off the phone but pretend they could penalize you for cancelling phone service, but the FCC did tell them "No, you can't have it both ways." Of course Nutjob Trumps FCC will probably try to let companies do as they wish, but who knows.

I was at a store that sold both Verizon and AT&T devices -- it was rather shady (I mean, the terms were clear but most people don't look at the fine print), AT&T had all these phones listed for like $1 a month less than Verizon -- but the Verizon phones were on a 24 month payoff while the AT&T were 36, so in reality you were paying like $200-400 more for the AT&T phones, not $24 less.

(Side note -- one reason Verizon for one did the "new every 2" on phones back in the day, it turned out the CDMA and EVDO technology was improving so much between one generation of Qualcomm chips and the next, increasing call and data capacity using the same amount of wireless spectrum and hardware on Verizon's end, they ran the numbers and found they were actually saving money replacing customer equipment and getting free capacity increases compared to having to install more cell sites, put more equipment (like going from a monopole or a 4-way sectorization to 6 or 8-way sectorized antennas), etc. on the phone company end of things.)

CISA exec blames nation-state hackers and Democrats for putting America's critical systems at risk

It's madness

It's madness. Violating the Hatch act, these jokers even wanted the airports to play a message saying something like "Due to the Democrats, wait times will be longer due to the gov't shutdown." or something like this. Some airports pointed out it violated the hatch act and they would not play it; some pointed out they use it to play informational messages, not political ones. Some pointed out the Dept. of Homeland Security did not own the screens in their airports and had no say over what played on them.

As for the shutdown -- I'm an indepdendent, it's both main parties faults really, there's nothing at all stopping them from funding the non-controversial stuff and sorting out the rest later. The US has only 2 main political parties, and most in the US pretend the 3rd parties simply don't exist, so any time there's a shutdown, both parties blame the other one. You usually don't have one party making inappropriate political messages as they are now though.

Microsoft veteran explains Windows quirk that made videos play in Paint

Blue pixels

Linux would do this too but the overlay color was a specific shade of blue instead. If you had the sub-pixel font rendering going you'd sometimes get individual pixels in text have video bleed through too (... if your text window was covering the video playback area.) If you force playback using xv or xvideo it may STILL do this.

CISA cuts more staff and reassigns others as government stays shut down

The incompetence

The incompetence of it.

Even if you're all for having ICE thug around the country (masked, anonymous, picking people up off the street and taking them to detention centers, when there's friends or relatives asking for their whereabouts syaing they aren't allowed to tell them..I'm not for this in case you couldn't tell..), Even if you were all for it, I'm just picturing like Dilbert, the guys from Office Space, and the IT Crowd, being handed vests, tasers, and guns and told to have at it. I'm just saying, besides it not making sense to shrink down CISA as they are, I *seriously* doubt a bunch of computer nerds and IT types are going to make particularly good ICE officers.

Or, CISA has a few BOFH types and they end up with a couple BOFHs on their hands.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Yup that's Texas for ya

Yup that's Texas for ya.. People in this state have a screw loose and this is exactly the kind of thing I expect from people there.

Huawei used its own silicon to re-educate DeepSeek so its output won’t bother Beijing

Re: Build another network

These are religious fundamentaliists. Indeed it makes no sense but I don't think mistranlations would end up with discussion of using another physical medoum.

Intel and Nvidia sitting in a tree, NVLink-I-N-G

Could make some nice chips!

I'm a big ARM fan, and don't care too much about Intel CPUs (although my current computers have one I ran an Nvidia Tegra K1 RM chromebook on Ubuntu with no issue and full opengl and cuda support as well. and with box86/box64 and fex out now even x86 on ARM is fine.)

But lets face it, integrating an Nvidia GPU into an Intel chip would be sick! Maybe Nvidia can help put the CPU on a power diet too while they are at it.

Vibe coding platform Replit's latest update is infuriating customers with surprise cost overruns

local AI

I am not about to do vibe coding (the 'lets just let the AI write the code and trust it's right') but if I were having one spiff up a bit of code (I'd make a diff and see what it actually changed) I'd run it locally. Probably slower but 0 the cost. (Electricity costs, but my GPU and CPU if both flat out draw like 135 watts altogether so it won't be all that high.)

Bring back your old Mac: 5 ways to refresh the OS on elderly Apples

Also Linux of choice

If I had an elderly Mac I'd try OCLP first, it's pretty good. If you find these options unsatisfactrory, you can also install Linux of your choice on the Intel models. Just like older PCs a regular 'full fatl distro runs pretty well on anything newer than the Core 2 series and runs 'OK' on them, as long as you have 4GB in there. 2GB or less you may want a lightweight distro.

SpaceX bulks up Starlink Direct to Cell with $17B EchoStar spectrum deal

Other satellite constellation

It puts an end of their ambitrions for a *new* mobile service satellite constellation. They already have like 7 or 8 TV sats and if they own Hughes I assume the Hughesnet isatellite internet ones as well.

Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor

May not have saved much

I'll note the HLT instruction actually ONLY halted the CPU until an interrupt came in (no power saving mode) on anything before the 486DX4 (marketing at it's finest, this was a clock tripled CPU not quadrupled as the DX4 name would imply.). Not a common chip so basically the Pentium. So on many Win95 machines this wouldn't have even saved power.

Also, shocking given modern CPUs but that 486 used like 3 watts and Pentium 90 7.5 watt TDP so it's not like now where a 'lower powered' Intel CPU (other than Celeron N) would use like 30 watts without power saving.

Ubuntu users left waiting after Canonical's servers take weekend off

Only 1 package for me

Oddly, for me, it seems like the *other* updates downloaded okay and it was ONLY the linux-firmware package that was either failing or downloading dead slow. (Which still resulted in a failed update unless you wanted to manually run apt --ignore-missing, which I didn't bother doing.)

I do have to wonder, what backlog? I mean, the update system typically goes to download updates on some schedule... not retry like minutes later if it fails. Do that many people just constantly see failed updates and IMMEDIATELY try to re-update to have a 36 minute update cause problems for days? To be honest, I could see snap doing something like that, but snap doesn't use security.ubuntu.com. I feel like something else was probably going on.. but *shrug*, also not too concerned about it as long as it doesn't just start happening on some regular basis.

Bring your own brain? Why local LLMs are taking off

Slow but free

I run the models I've played with locally. Slow (I have a 4GB VRAM card so all to often I must run on CPU) but effective, and it's not THAT slow. No usage limits, no cost per use, and of course as soon as I would have encountered usage limits, throttling, or having to wait due to the provider seeing usage exceed capacity, at that point my local model is also faster.

Windows Backup for Organizations doesn't actually save data files

windows store?

how many enterprise users (let alone other users) install anything from there?