Posts by Denarius

The Fast and the Curious: Safety-conscious Red Hat eyes continuously certified Linux platform for motors

so why does it matter ?

a computer to run a radio, CD, MP3 player ? Seriously ? what is gained other than complexity, cost and dependencies ? Bad enough waiting for a TV to load its OS then display something. Slower than the old valve analogues with their warmup times.

I think the 50 year old slightly weathered car down back is looking more like a restoration goal every month. Serviceable, no entertainment dependencies, no heating or cooling dependencies. The one change is a CDI addtion, with a CDI that I can repair and keep a few spares. (capacitors, BUX80 and so on)

As for for the thought of a complex OS doing anything in a car, agree with previous. Bring on the QNX and leave everything else mechanical. Once can disassemble most switches and do a refurb if replacements not available, unlike a block of plastic with wires sticking out. You know, save the planet, stop waste, cut pollution by industrial waste etc

Traffic lights, who needs 'em? Lucky Kentucky residents up in arms over first roundabout

Re: French Roundabouts are useless

Greybyrd, sounds like Canberra in Oz. One has to accelerate violently to do any lane change or the idiots beside or behind will attempt to block or overtake. In the meantime , if moron in front is vaguely non-comatose, they slow down. I pity truckies.

Words to strike fear into admins' hearts: One in five workers consider themselves 'digital experts' these days

UUOC

sed "s/Digital Expert/Outsourcing Vendor/g" $article

Re: Buried the lede

<rant> radio !!! As a sufferer of multiple vehicles of mostly European origin it is becoming hard to find

(a) how do you start/stop this b* thing?

(b( where is the handbrake?

(c) where is the damned gear stick?

(d) how do I turn off those multiple beeping/honking sounds from the instruments ?

(e) do those multiple distractions to driving actually signify anything I need to know ?

(f) where the hell is the fuel tank cover and cap on this thing ?

(g) why cant I turn off that foul noise previous driver has selected by total entertainment system shutdown or at very least, get it to change channel ?

I could do all of these things 10 years ago without thought. Now every damn medium truck down to motorcycle is a RTFM manual, if one can find one before attempting entry, or use. Bring back the standard 1928 Cadillac layout that was a standard everyone new.

As for for computers, compare a late 1980s or early Sun YP network with automount and diskless workstations that got along on 10BaseT or less for the borkage of clouds, anything M$ and the huge CPU. memory loads inflicted and need for gigabit networks to slowly show that latest waste of electrons from Jacinta in HR. And dont start me on the markup language abominations with their megabloat of a 2 Kb text file to 100 Kb of web page, or worse if its all in a database, sucked out and "presented" to end user. </rant>

Watchdog thinks Google tricked Australians into giving up data, sues. Judge semi-agrees

and in new phone

just spent frustrating hours going thru all the permissions settings trying to turn off Slurp and Co activities. Definitely Android designed to make one give up trying for a bit of privacy. All the not so obvious places permission to upload data. I do miss the ancient Nokias that just worked. Except for their feral autocorrect that took a fiddle to turn off. Perhaps company law should change so all big tech execs and political friends must have multiple cameras and mics installed in houses, yatchts, except toilets. They are disgusting enough without that.

FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

Now I know education systems have failed for such assertions to be made. Straight out of 19th century academia. See Josephus who was around at the time.

NSA helps out Microsoft with critical Exchange Server vulnerability disclosures in an April shower of patches

and I remember vaguely

criticisms of sendmail. The only config file indistinguishable from line noise. I know, I know exchange is so much more than an MTA

Beloved pixel pusher Paint prepares to join Notepad for updates from Microsoft Store

Re: MS Paint has never been so bad

NotePad !!! seriously ? When you have the power of vi ? I still use it as it is fast, reliable, quick, powerful and I dont need to fiddle with that damn mouse. And dont mention that other thing thats starts religious warfare. Oh too late

What's this about a muon experiment potentially upending Standard Model of physics? We speak to one of the scientists involved

wonderful

as Asimov said, discoveries happen when a scientist says "That's odd" Something for the real researchers to study to confirm it is a reliable result and ponder possible causes. About time something new appeared in Standard Model

Australian ponders requiring multiple IDs to sign up for social media, plus more crypto-busting backdoors

usual idiots

Policy produced by Canberra Bubble. They simply dont know the voracious appetite of anti Social media for any information on citizens. It is getting hard to not use faecesbook, goggle or M$ authentication on state and fed gov sites. I suspect the thought of automated identity theft does not bother them at all because they lack the basic cynicism and suspicion of any form of power, common in the modern bureaucrats or do-gooders of all forms.

Twitter nukes AI-generated twits who backed Amazon and pushed anti-union rhetoric

possible movie

So, a rerun of Duel ? No need to avoid the empty drivers cab and judging by the way the semis thunder down Oz highways, self driving trucks will be homicidal from day One.

Another SAP in the face for Oracle: Alphabet soups up financial software by moving off Big Red systems

significance ?

not ego driven tit for tat, but that corporate arterial sclerosis will do to Google what anti-trust has not.

Ice Lake, Baby: Intel's 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server processors to arrive at last

Re: Is that 2.65x speed improvement over 3 generations ago core for core and clock for clock?

@katrinab: ROFLMA. Very witty.

IBM creates a COBOL compiler – for Linux on x86

COBOL

the language that never dies. The journos predicting its death do. Still have a soft spot for it, altho I never used it in anger

Seagate claims it shipped its third zettabyte of storage in record time

Do you means

ZFS is approaching its limits already. That I did not expect to see. Must be the ad networks and TLAs stashing misinformation

Atheists appeal to higher power for intercession over alleged sins against privacy

Re: Name jokes aside,

not half as much as the unprinted book NoGods are worse. Most appropriate given the twentieth centuries biggest butcvhers

We finally get to spot a burnt-out comet and what is it covered in? Talcum powder

interesting

seems consistent with Deep Impact results. Huge cloud of clays which was not expected.

Imagine your data center backup generator kicks in during power outage ... and catches fire. Well, it happened

Re: This would never have happened at a certain broadcaster I used to work for.

Indeed Jake. Called Detroit Diesels. Designed specifically to go from cold to full load ( V12) in 0.3 seconds. About 3 seconds IMHO. Used a Rootes blower ITIRC. Very thirsty and in my experience, leaked oil worse than a 1950s Triumph on a hot day. But then, they were in a desert. I have found them in offshore fishing boats in West Oz, Naval tugs as well as power stations. I will give them this, they started fast, took a lot of punishment and even when one phase was shorted by idiots along the local grid, not once did the gen set fail.

Yep, you're totally unique: That one very special user and their very special problem

Car controls

@Kev. Thats a 1970s VW layout. Just suffered similar hell with emergency services vehicles and hire cars in Oz on a deployment. Mercedes van: Auto gear are right stick on steering column. Brake is little button on end of said stick. Turn indicators on left stalk where windscreen controls used exist in Oz. Never did find them. Parking brake automatic I think Fortunately not needed despite floods around. Hate having to swap muscle maps around because the thousands of petty rules dont specify anything useful, like standardised controls despite them being much the same for 90 years. The Europeans mass car makers (all one and half of them) are morons when it comes to user interface design.

Two Toyota RAV4s of slightly different vintages Older one good layout as one would expect. Newer one no obvious parking brake. At least switch bank to left of drivers seat has a red light on a button that lit up if PB automatically engaged at power down. On none of the b##td things was there an obvious secure place to stash the open/energise fob so keys went into different places making getting them from different users tedious. Back to IT design fails. I still use a PC with white sticky tape on power button because it is like HBD spaceship. No buttons visible without a UV lamp.

BOFH: Bullying? Not on my watch! (It's a Rolex)

BOFH and PFY

my emotional support group

NASA sets the date for first helicopter flight on another planet – and the craft will carry a piece of history

first flight ?

A few machines got off ground earlier than Wrights. But were any of them controllable, steerable and stable ? How many got out of ground effect ? Certainly not Aders. 20cm is ground effect distance, not true aviation.

The silicon supply chain crunch is worrying. Now comes a critical concern: A coffee shortage

Re: Nuts come from other places too

dont you mean Ethiopia and East Timor ? PNG used to do a tolerable brew as does Vanuatu. In meantime, the only hitech coffee operations in world on the Atherton Tablelands will benefit immensely. I'll get my bulk order in this week

SQL now a dirty word for Oracle, at least in cloudy data warehouses

another instance of FAIL

From "easy to read,write and understand" code in COBOL to SQL itself, history has shown the manglement and PHB classes are completely incapable of writing useful anything and worse, regard such mundane simple things are for the peasants, not important process drones like themselves.

Australia, India, Japan, and USA create joint critical tech working group

when in doubt

establish a talkfest. Nothing to see here, move along

India pauses blockchain-powered SMS spam-scrubber after it swallows people's one-time login codes

a simpler solution

spammers users get hard labour in a suitable salt mine in the hills. A slight sentence reduction for dobbing in spammers, their contacts and finance services.

State of Maine threatens to tear up Workday HR contract and request $21m refund if it cannot remedy concerns

survived an attack

on a 1980s mainframe ? Probably did not speak TCP/IP well enough to be vulnerable to current attacks. Decades ago I heard of intruders doing update maintenance on servers so their attacks would work.. Another case of this and the usual PHB cult thinking maintenance is optional ? Seen it in housing, hardware, equipment and IT.

China outlines plan to boost economy with AI, a cloud OS it controls – and bringing in skilled foreigners

think of the synergies

Why dont they join forces with the TLAs on AI, data capture and analytics. Such a confluence of interests.

The perils of non-disclosure? China 'cloned and used' NSA zero-day exploit for years before it was made public

failure to take long view

Another symptom of the intellectual decline of the ruins of Western culture. A near total inability in the manglement level to consider longer term consequences of anything. Even more astonishing because of the ephemeral nature ( by historical standards) of software. One wonders how much Britain lost by keeping its WW2 computing skills secret so they could read other countries private communications. Not sure they gained much from it. If computing had been encouraged they might have kept a lead in something a little longer.

Australia facepalms as Facebook blocks bookstores, sport, health services instead of just news

Re: Typical

@AP. Too hard on pollies. Not enough on their swarms of parasites advisors and senior public serpents. Like most of manglement, they have a deep contempt for any type of technical expertise. As for the Murdoch alleged conspiracy, given the general contempt for _all_ media in Oz, where is the evidence for hypothesis ? Where is evidence it would make any difference ?

Re: Screaming from the over-entitled masses

lychee (sic) too easy. Cutting of womens support and rural fire brigades groups ? That's commercial news to be cut ? Yep, all the signs of something thats not critical thinking.

BTW, I dont use any tripe dispensers

Kinoite: Immutable Fedora variant with KDE Plasma desktop on the way

In short

the time of shared runtime libraries is dead, again. Now everything has its "special" set of runtime binaries, libraries and configs. How nice that RAM and storage is now so cheap

Bill Gates on climate change: Planting trees is not the answer, emissions need to be zeroed out to avoid disaster

does Gates realise

that when it sets, concrete reabsorbs the CO2 back into its chemical structure ? Just counting manufacturing releases is misleading. Total net release after concrete has set should be figure pontificated about. As for population stabilisation, already done. By 2050 on existing trends, planets population will begin decline. In some countries already a political issue. Japan, Singapore, China. yes China.

New Jersey blames Microsoft for weeks of outages, glitches plaguing coronavirus vaccine sign-up website

@six

No, Six. IMHO, governments and corps are too reliant on smooth talking PHBs and sales weasels who have no project coding scars, able to hoodwink even less informed clerks in suits about what software can and cannot do. Not enough formal contract writers who know what needs to be non-negotiable. None of these skills are sexy or exciting but a few hundred years of project experience show they are needed.

The old specifications, design, review, code and test, debug in sequence isn't done. Project creep and scope changes are allowed instead of being grounds for termination. As much as I hate to say it. more snoopy qualified auditors who report to joint sittings of governments and are protected by whistle blower laws are needed. A formal employment contract for pollies and senior public serpents on being elected or employed may help, if administered by an independent branch of the auditors. Cant trust senior public bureaucrats or pollies to judge themselves

Manhunt: 'Armed and dangerous' MIT AI scientist sought by cops probing grad student's gun murder

so the SciFi scripts were wrong ?

Its not the deranged computer, but the allegedly deranged computer scientist ?

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

Re: Blind spots

@Whitter: See CS Lewis essay: "In Praise of old Books"

Re: Teach people?

@Richard. After removing time wasting rubbish first so the poor teachers have time in curriculum to teach critical thinking

Re: Trust nothing, check your data, use various sources.

@Rockburner. Nope. IMHO, the reverse is more likely to be the case. The days of taught belief in "Authority" ended in 1964. Once the belief that reality can be different for individuals to the point that feminist glaciology is supposedly a real subject the ability to discern and assess information is long gone. As for checking and multiple sources, regrettably I find GBS aphorism more succinct. " Believe nothing until it is officially denied" Unfortunately that does mean sources that are sometimes accurate (ie, in accordance with the reality that hurts when it hits you on head) are missed in the welter of dross. Yes, I do cross check where it matters, However, I note search engines, Google especially, are now becoming nearly useless for search unless one has a good idea of the relevant keywords to exclude

Linus Torvalds labels Super Bowl 'violent version of egg-and-spoon race'

Re: It's all homoerotic crap.

Still not enough for me to miss EDS short ads. The Herding Cats one is a classic

Re: I'd rather go reformat my computer & reinstal Windows ME.

ROFLMAO, to wifes annoyance. Years since I read Kafka, Thank $Deity

Never understood some names

Why do some games get called football when mostly the egg or round thing is carried by runners who throw it mostly ? Why is a game consisting of getting sunburned standing around named after a nocturnal insect ?

Why do some people loudly boast of "their team" when it is owned, usually, by Johnny Foreigner ?

If the target object does not start moving at 160 kmh, it is boring to watch IMHO. Even then, I have better things to do. However, testing kernels is not one of them. As kernels get bigger, all I have noticed is linux sound on laptops, especially HPs, fails to work more often. Also getting harder to fix. Hardware that just worked 5 years or more ago now fails or required tedious fiddling down in ALSA or sysctl somewhere

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: “one of his major successes”

so if he came back he was supposed to put fires out by doing what ? A stand-in was in place, as required. Are you one of those types that value meaningless gestures above rational behavior. I would prefer a rested PM rather than one run ragged. A weary PM is more likely to be run by the advisors and other infestations in parliament

now openly admitted

so is M$ one of the bigger players like China secretly slipping money to political parties under radar (easy to do in Oz) to get legislation they want ? I note the Greens, as usual, have shown their lack of understanding of human behaviour again with a call to build a government owned search engine. I ask again who initiated this legislation as no clear reason has surfaced yet.

Satya Nadella spoke with Australian PM about opportunities created by pay-for-news-plan. Zuck called the Treasurer for a chat, too

Re: The Great Australian Firewall

@PhillipN. True IMHO. When overseas outside Oz-NZ Oz does not count. However, the clerks who presume to be intellectuals and advisors in Oz do seem to have the strange idea that Oz is a pace setter and looked to for "leadership" . Just why this delusion is so persistent is unknown. To be irrelevant would be their ultimate nightmare. Please, do us Ozzies a favor world. Totally ignore us.

Very little helps: Tesco serves up 3-for-1 borkage special to self-scanning Tesco shoppers

other devices

my ancient navmans run some kind of WinCE. Odd that the Tesco application breaks to OS (being generous) level access. The navmans refuse to allow that. One has to mount the device under Linux and tweak the boot init file to change the CarNav app to something useful, like XCSoar. Actually runs quite well on them. XCSoar has dropped support, understandably, but the last WinCE version had all I needed for pottering around a simple 500 KM triangle or less and not bothered by cold at 15000 feet. As for AC, odd. Fnord were reportedly using QNX, a good choice. I concur about never buying a vehicle with embedded Window$. Modern vehicles are temperamental enough. In Oz they try to kill kids by autolocking when keys are inside. In an Oz summer, that is about 15 minutes before death ensures on a hot day.

SAP: Come to the cloud with us, we promise there's total accountability and lower TCO with lift-and-shift ERP package

inertia ?

s/inertia/despair/g

Users long ago given up any hope of a usable interface, let alone concise information

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

You mean

Oz has real journalists ( outside of El Reg) ? I thought they were recyclers for press releases. As for Google et al, who cares, unless it means gmail and Google storage also vanish. More business for M$, or is that who is really funding this ?

SpaceX powers through bad case of wind to nail Falcon 9's eighth droneship landing

Re: Congrats

NASA Boeing. FTFY.

Two clichés, one headline: 'No good deed goes unpunished' and 'It's always DNS'

Re: Change management matters

Ah change control. Yep, everything thru them. Disapproval granted for lack of full stop in final sentence, wind is in the east etc. And when approval does come, its about 2 days after change was required. Emergencies ? Your fault, you should have planned for that.

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Re: The software isn't the main problem

the irony is that Boeing had an aircraft in the capacity /load range that the 737MAX was "extended" to fill. Look up 767. But that stopped being built years ago and required separate pilot training.

nothing happening here then

IMHO, until the PHBs responsible feel serious pain, are fired and forbidden to work in aviation, automotive or any safety significant industry again (that eliminates flipping burgers) or are taken outside hangars, shot, mangled and otherwise lose their bonuses, not necessarily in that order, nothing will change Only the shareholders and victims families suffer. Back to making a board member fly coach/economy/lowest price and service seat on any random 737 will do.