Posts by tapanit

Boeing goes boing: 757 loses a wheel while taxiing down the runway

Re: potato potato

Frequent misspellings aside, Colombia has been officially spelled like that since Colombian independence, at least in the UK already since its predecessor state (nowadays known as Gran Colombia) was officially recognized in 1825. There are several official documents from both USA and UK online referring to Colombia dated over a century ago, but I can'ẗ find any using "Columbia". (Feel free to point counterexamples to me.)

Some other languges, however, use the "u" form, e.g., German "Kolumbien", Finnish "Kolumbia".

Ubuntu's 'Mantic Minotaur' peeks out of the labyrinth

Re: Non-interactive FDE is possible with linux

It is also possible to set up non-interactive FDE simply by having the key on a USB stick. Of course it's less safe in case the stick is stolen along with the disk, but I think that's not significantly more likely than having the entire machine stolen. And the stick is easy to remove (or destroy) when discarding a disk.

You can also set it up so that the operating system part isn't encrypted (or is decrypted via a USB stick as above, or with the TPM chip) but the data (like, images of VMs doing the real work) need to be decrypted via a remote connection (ssh or something). Some care is needed to make sure everything valuable is encrypted but still relatively easy way to get a useful level of protection.

ICANN warns UN may sideline tech community from future internet governance

Look at the bright side

It doesn't sound so bad to me. Without technical community involvement they'll inevitably break the Internet for good, and we'll all be better off without it. Cheers!

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Off topic

I remember using a teletype (that's a printing terminal without screen) with 110 baud connection, and it was perfectly adequate (the thing couldn't print faster than that anyway).

Europe wants more cities to use datacenter waste heating. How's that going?

Re: When the Arctic ice cap is sufficiently melted

In Finland waste heat already is a high value commodity. Most cities have central heating, power plants generating heat that's transferred to apartment buildings as hot water. Excess heat from data centers works well as an extra heat source there. Of course Finland is well north of 54th parallel, indeed almost entirely north of 60°, and so obviously colder than most of Europe.

Time Lords decree an end to leap seconds before risky attempt to reverse time

New SI prefixes

Reading the BIPM resolutions I noticed another one of interest: they finally decided to add new SI prefixes: ronna, ronto, quetta and quecto. Can't wait to see the first announcement of a ronnabyte SSD.

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Yep. I have two Hitachi Deskstars that've been running for over 93300 hours now (almost 11 years). I've been ready to replace them for a long time but so far they're showing no signs of failure and they're not in all that critical use now so I'm not going to rush it.

Never mind the Panic button – there's a key to Compose yourself

An amusing detail: Current official standard Finnish keyboard layout (SFS 5966) allows typing pretty much all Latin-based characters, up to and including Vietnamese double-accented ones like ấ, ứ &c - but Finnish Windows doesn't use it, instead it uses Swedish layout for Finnish as well. (They used to be the same until Finland decided to add the extra accented characters.) Moreover it's all but impossible to buy physical keyboards with the extra characters. In Linux they have of course worked since forever.

Fancy some Surface kit but wary of new Windows? Microsoft lets commercial customers pick 10 or 11

Re: "Otherwise they'd probably all demand MacBooks"

Apps are no longer the king on the desktop: most people only use a browser anyway. Some diehards want a word processor that works offline, but for them LibreOffice is as good as "it's just like another version of Word".

I suspect people like that are already the majority, and they only use Windows because it comes bundled with new PCs. If their nerdy niece sets them up with Ubuntu, they're perfectly happy with it.

On the other hand, for them Windows, whatever version, is good enough, too. The only potentially relevant advantage of Linux would be better support for old hardware. That's not a big issue with Win10, but Win11 is another story. Somehow I suspect Win10 support will not end in 2025.

Spring tears down math geek t-shirt listing because it dared to mention the trademarked word 'zeta'

Re: Don't think iSmash (chain of phone repair shops in England) is owned by Apple.

Of course there's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ii,_Finland

Tech spec experts seek allies to tear down ISO standards paywall

I'd like to push for an EU regulation to the effect that no law or official publication of any kind may refer to any standard that's not freely available.

Yeah, not going to happen. We can dream though.

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Firefox was not quite the last bastion to support ftp: Konqueror still does. (Just tried it in Kubuntu 20.04.)

Linux kernel sheds legacy IDE support, but driver-dominated 5.14 rc1 still grows

Re: I. AM. OUTRAGED!

I actually did recover data from an IDE disk last year. It took some digging in the junk box to find the parts needed (it did not work with a SATA-IDE adapter, I had to fire up an ancient machine with real IDE interface).

Open standard but not open access: Schematron author complains about ISO paywall

Let's start a campaign for EU regulation to the effect that if anything is called a standard or referred to in any legislation or similar by the EU or any member state, it must be freely available. Might add that any member states are banned from participating in any organization that tries to copyright standards. And a similar federal legislation in the USA and wherever. (I would not go as far as making all ISO employees criminals by definition, though.)

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

You can configure Firefox to use whichever search engine you like, and not to send stuff you enter on the address bar to search engines, if you like (I have). But it's admittedly not as easy to change those settings as one might like.

Now that's a Finnish-ing move: Finland offers free 90-day tryout of Helsinki tech scene with childcare thrown in

Re: "Fortunately most Finns speak English but even so."

Actually most liquor stores in Finland are open until 9 pm during the week and until 6 pm on Saturdays. And you can get booze from restaurants even later.

As for walking around with ski sticks, google "Nordic Walking".

Just picking nits but the cold record is actually -60.7°F (-51.5°C).

Lizards for lunch? Crazy tech? Aliens?! Dana Dash: First Girl on the Moon is perfect for the little boffin-to-be in your life

Re: STEM

Curiously, while I'd use "maths" with -s in other contexts, I would never use the -s version in the expression "Do the math!".

20 years deep into a '2-year' mission: How ESA keeps Cluster flying

Activate Omega-13.

"Never give up. Never surrender." I must watch Galaxy Guest again one of these days.

Seriously though, this is really cool. Sarris would have no chance against these guys.

A few reasons why cops didn't immediately shoot down London Gatwick airport drone menace

Re: Ahhhh shoot!

'A falling bullet from a "miss" will only reach its terminal velocity on the way down. It's weight is small. So it would be comparable to a hailstone.'

Umm, no. Unless shot straight up, the bullet also has *horizontal* velocity, and that's what'll do the damage. There are well-documented cases of bullets shot randomly in the air causing damage, even killing people.

Accused Brit hacker Lauri Love will NOT be extradited to America

Re: The intersting question is...

Crime should primarily be prosecuted in whatever country the perpetrator was at the time. If you can't get adequate prosecution there, it should be fixed there rather than using extradition.

Many countries, though apparently not Britain, allow extradition only to countries where the punishment can't be significantly more severe (notably so Finland, though it doesn't extradite its citizens to the USA in any case, not even voluntarily).

You may well be right that there will be no UK court case and the case will remain open in the USA. I don't think they'd consider him important enough to hijack forcibly though, or even try extradition very hard (maybe from some countries) - I can't see Finland extraditing him for example. But travel to the USA would be out of bounds for him.

Oi! Linux users! Want some really insecure closed-source software?

Re: Bigger jumps in Version numbers @druck

While ancient Romans didn't use P as a numeral, some medieval texts do - but its value is 400, not a million. So XP would be 390.

:-)

Nokia’s big comeback: Watches, bathroom scales, a 3310 PR gimmick, Snake, erm...

Re: No 3G and lack of quad band support

Get rid of the display altogether. It's not needed - as older readers may recall, landline phones didn't have displays (with very few exceptions).

Apple quietly launches next-gen encrypted file system

Re: checklist

Case insensitivity is a major pain if you have to deal with several languages. The lower-upper -conversion is language-dependent - e.g., in several languages accents disappear in capitalization, in Turkish upper case 'i' isn't 'I' but 'İ', in German ß becomes 'SS' (or 'SZ' in some cases) in upper case...

Censor-happy China, battling Brazilians ... just what's left in the wake of ICANN's now ex-CEO?

Next CEO has been announced a couple of weeks ago: Göran Marby, now at Swedish Telecom.

RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Re: Cheaper to just leave 'em

They might have left some airplanes in there on purpose in order to see how the bomb affects them.

ICANN urges US, Canada: Help us stop the 'predatory' monster we created ... dot-sucks!

Re: Or, in other words.

Actually I seem to recall ICANN routinely reserves icann.anything in all registrar agreements for new domains, so icann.sucks is presumably reserved to them already. Guess they know they suck. :-)

Linux kernel devs adopt Bill and Ted's excellent code of conduct

"If however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable."

Given how little it takes for some people to feel uncomfortable, I assume that is not intended to be taken literally (it really couldn't be). Actually, given history of kernel lists and Linus' past behaviour, I suspect it's not intended to be taken seriously at all.

Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers

Re: reducing energy consumption

Vladimir Plouzhnikov: "reduction of population is impossible in anything approaching long term."

I rather think it's trivial in the long term: human population will naturally reduce to zero. Possibly it doesn't even take all that long a term.

Even in short term, say a couple of centuries, chances of a catastrophe that'll wipe out 99%+ of the species are not impossibly small.

Planning to fly? Pour out your shampoo, toss your scissors, rename terrorist Wi-fi!

"the stated point of (some of the) middle-east-based terror groups is to cause more and more disruption in the west to normal functions such as air travel, not by actually disrupting them themselves, but by vaguely implying they PLAN to disrupt them and have the response (from TSA et. al) disrupt them much more."

Indeed. If TSA were judged by the actual impact of their activities, they should be prosecuted for aiding and abetting terrorists.

ICANN destroys Google's dotless domain dream

Actually .africa wasn't rejected as such, but there were two applicants for it and one of them was now rejected (presumably the other will get it, although that's not formally decided yet).

The objection to .gcc was due to potential of confusion with Gulf Cooperation Council (the applicant was Goldman Sachs, or technically their fund GCCIX WLL).

NSA: NOBODY could stop Snowden – he was A SYSADMIN

Sysadmins are hard to stop...

Mandatory xkcd reference: https://xkcd.com/705/

Ten ancestors of the netbook

How about HP110 from 1984? Cf. http://oldcomputers.net/hp110.html

Of course it's a arguable whether it is "rather smaller than a laptop" - it was certainly heavier than many modern laptops (mainly due to huge battery), but it was tiny by the standards of 1980s.

YES! It's the TARDIS PC!

Looking at the specs, it almost certainly will run Linux (and they sell it without OS, too).

I'm not going to splunk 1k£ to test it, however.

Linux kernel dumps 386 chip support

Re: 486?

486 is still supported, judging by comments in the changelog. There are some sort-of-486-like processors that are no longer supported, however:

"Note that the 386 is no longer supported, this includes AMD/Cyrix/Intel 386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX, Cyrix/TI 486DLC/DLC2, UMC 486SX-S and the NexGen Nx586."

Global warming still stalled since 1998, WMO Doha figures show

Re: Forever is a long time

Actually dinosaurs lasted over 160 million years and dominated the Earth for some 135 million.

Anyway, yes, Earth will survive any climate change until Sun gobbles it up, but whether the human species will is another matter.

Human Rights Watch proposes new laws of robotics

Sounds to me like regular landmines fit in the 3rd category already...

KDE 'annoys the hell of' Linus Torvalds

Re: If Linus doesn't like KDE4's "configurability" that much ...

The article is somewhat misleading: Linus explicitly said he likes KDEs configurability:

"But ah, the ability to configure things". All in all, given Linus' style it's all but high praise to KDE.

How Nokia managed to drive its in-house Linux train off the rails

Re: Well, kinda

Interesting. My N900 has been rock solid - the only thing I've had problems with is MMS messages (which have never been officially supported), but I've never needed to remove battery or anything like that. And I grieve for its never-materialized successor (N9 does not count, I want a real keyboard).

Intel 330 120GB SSD review

You missed one missing key feature: the 320 series is database-safe, with capacitor that has enough power to flush pending writes in the event of power failure, unlike 330 (or 520 for that matter). Which explains why the 320 series is selling for a much higher price.

Finland beefs up HPC oomph with Cray 'Cascade' super

A misspelling in system name: It's Vuori, not "Vouri". (Louhi, however, is correct.)

So, that vast IT disaster you may have caused? Come in, sit down

Re: Tape?

In some countries it's perfectly legal to record a conversation you're part of, even without other parties knowing about it. In Finland, for example, where it was actually confirmed by the (Finnish) Supreme Court some years back. And yes, obviously such a recording would be usable as evidence.

Ten... Sata 3 SSDs

Re: HP SSDs

Indeed. Apparently the only database-safe SSDs in the consumer market are the old and slow Intel 320 series ones (the new "enterprise" series 710 isn't much faster, but much more expensive - it is supposed to last much longer, though).

You might still find some (out of production) OCZ Vertex 2 Pro models on sale somewhere, but are getting scarce (and often very expensive - I just picked a 50GB one - the last available at that store - at €80, but mostly they go for five times that).

iPad app that lets mute kids speak menaced by patent lawsuit

Re: every patent invalidated is a victory for us all

Algorithms are indeed often really hard to create. The hard part is usually mathematics. Which isn't patentable either, as you probably know, and for a good reason.

That something is hard to do and should be rewarded doesn't mean patents are a good way of doing so. (Quite a lot of seriously hard mathematics has been created without patents.)

30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on

Re: Curious to think...

"the human animal seems to be the only species hell bent on screwing itself into the ground over this contentious & self imposed issue, whilst all other existing flora & fauna on this planet will [...] simply adapt"

Well, yes, but "simply adapting" will often mean going extinct. :-)

Of course, that is the way of evolution: as the environment changes, some species will survive while others won't, and there's little doubt that nature as a whole will cope. But from a narrow human viewpoint, it is of some interest if the human species is among the survivors.

Lawyers of Mordor menace Hobbit boozer

Re: Are they also suing scientific journals?

The mere name "Hobbit" probably isn't covered by copyright, but it is trademarked.

I doubt they have (or indeed could have) trademark on hominid species... unlike copyright, trademarks are domain-specific (so that, e.g., Apple could be two separate trademarks, Apple Computers and Apple Records), but they may well have registered the trademark for drinks and such. Copyright enters the picture in where images from the film have been used (which Nature &c presumably didn't use).

Re: Fuck Saul Zentz

"You cannot copyright folklaw." Maybe not, but you can certainly trademark ancient words - witness Apple, for example.

Child abuse suspect won't be forced to decrypt hard drive

Re: Re: Re: I don't get it...

"I am of the understanding that in UK courts people can be compelled to answer questions by a judge."

I'm quite certain you're wrong, when it come to the accused. The principle against self-incrimination is rather strongly entrenched in various international legal treaties, notably in the European Convention on Human Rights, which I believe is binding in the UK.

Now *witnesses*, i.e., people who are not being accused themselves, can be compelled to speak, but that's not at issue here.

Five ways Microsoft can rescue Windows Phone

Doctorow and PS

Hey - I read Cory Doctorow's novels and occasionally even Postscript source, but Windows phones I won't touch with a ten-foot pole if I can help it!