* Posts by xenny

175 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009

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Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

xenny

Re: Live CD?

Maybe it is tricky to test install kernel drivers that require a reboot on a Live CD ?

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

xenny

So what is the difference between "work" = Dell and ""professional-grade productivity" = Dell Pro ?

The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

xenny

Agreed the Pi is undeniably better for hardware twiddling, but a Micro form factor ThinkCentre is about 10W with an i5-6500, 32 GB of RAM and SATA SSD and has a lot more choices for OS as well as rather more performance. I'd far rather have one for general use/programming.

Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it

xenny
Pint

photorec

I'd really recommend this - it restores to other media so you don't risk further damage to anything remaining on the card and doesn't just find images. On a couple of bucket list trips, I've been bought a lot of beers for saving people's holiday photos.

Has once required a sort of bash shell game when I noticed I was recovering a lot of pictures of a scantily clad lady who I guessed from his expression wasn't the lady officially accompanying the camera owner on this trip.

Broadcom has willingly dug its VMware hole, says cloud CEO

xenny

Re: Alternative to Player with USB support?

I think that's no longer an issue - the release notes for 7.0 include

"Devices: The EHCI and XHCI USB controller devices are now part of the open source base package"

Vernor Vinge, first author to describe cyberspace and 'The Singularity,' dies at 79

xenny

Re: Alas!

Vinge was an optimist, so they will defeat the Blight.

I'm more regretting not discovering how Sherkaner survives, which is my conclusion from "the body was never found".

xenny

Re: Fire Upon the Deep - spoilers

The Usenet paradigm I would argue is essential to fully appreciating the story.

Some of the pleasure/pain of Usenet was needing to assess the veracity/utility of messages that were asynchronous, often originally written by someone you didn't share a native language with and rendered harder to comprehend by different cultural norms, which have converged markedly over the past 30+ years.

That exactly mirrors Twirlip's comment about hexapodia and the skrodes. Twirlip has no ground interacting locomotory appendages, so is lacking in context for what it is trying to describe, and at the far end of a lengthy translation train to boot.

I think it is hard to completely experience the realization at the end of the book without having spent some time on really early Usenet and having analogous experiences there.

The book is fantastic without that experience, but I think benefits from having had access to the net of a million lies at some time the 1980s.

We asked Intel to define 'AI PC'. Its reply: 'Anything with our latest CPUs'

xenny

"Desktop" ?

I thought Meteor Lake was mobile only?

Boeing paper trail goes cold over door plug blowout

xenny

The title was too long.

That could be a risky sanction. I'm seriously wondering if there is any documentation existing they can handover, or if someone is trying to spin up enough of a "test" IT environment with a rolled back date to create some.

xenny

Re: Why aren't these people facing jail time?

When you say door failure, if anyone isn't aware, we're talking about a cargo door which is rather larger than the normal passenger access doors. It took a not insignificant amount of the fuselage skin with it.

Add bacteria to the list of things that can run Doom

xenny

Lack of ambition.

Blow the ballistic missile defense mechanism.

Use individual MIRVs to illuminate pixels.

To economise on missiles, you can illuminate several neighbouring pixels by using a warhead with the yield turned all the way up, or turned all the way down for just one.

Frame rate should be as high as you want, but post the various SALT treaties, games will now be rather short.

Surface Duo crashes the party as Doctor Who celebrates 60th birthday

xenny

Re: Tom Baker

I've been dipping into the classic stuff, and found I enjoyed Pertwee more than Baker, so I'd suggest Spearhead From Space. Has the bonus of a decent amount of UNIT and very good picture quality as it was mostly shot on film. Some of the shots may remind you a little of the early revival episodes.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

xenny

Thanks for hunting the reference out. I was sure he'd said something to that effect, but hadn't had the time to look for it.

China's great CPU hope – Loongson – may be only four years behind Intel

xenny

Re: Revivified MIPS

So the obvious question is how much work would it be to get Irix running on this?

Soft-reboot in systemd 254 sounds a lot like Windows' Fast Startup

xenny

I rarely edit init scripts, but the ability to run then line at a time by hand can sometimes be a lifesaver. Some of this really feels like development for the sake of justifying P's employment.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

xenny

Re: Also, I just noticed...

There's a lively discussion on Ars about the practicality of exploiting it from JS.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/encryption-breaking-password-leaking-bug-in-many-amd-cpus-could-take-months-to-fix.1494795/post-42056956 in particular seems logical. A sane JS interpreter/JIT is unlikely to emit the machine code required but instead optimize it away.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

xenny

If there's a glut of Pu, why am I seeing stories like https://science.howstuffworks.com/plutonium-238-fuel-shortage-nasa.htm about a shortage of the stuff hindering space exploration?

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

xenny

Re: new hardware requirements

You sure about the dropped CPU support? I'm writing this on an Ivy Bridge machine running 20H2, and we still deploy Nehalem machines for some people without problem.

Fake prudes: Catholic uni AI bot taught to daub bikinis on naked chicks

xenny

Do I detect a reference to the tape that came with the BBC?

Microsoft patches patch for Meltdown bug patch: Windows 7, Server 2008 rushed an emergency fix

xenny

Re: aregross

There are definitely 32 bit Meltdown/Spectre patches available now.

Looking at https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4073757/protect-your-windows-devices-against-spectre-meltdown (there's a section explicitly for 32-bit Windows) and https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4088878/windows-7-update-kb4088878 I think they went on general release with the March patch Tuesday.

I remember (no link, sorry) seeing them offered an an out of band not on general release update perhaps in late January or Feb.

Meltdown/Spectre week three: World still knee-deep in something nasty

xenny

Re: Motherboard Fixes

If it's any reassurance, I've just done several hundred, deploying the initial Intel microcode and then rolling it back as they've acknowledged it is buggy.

I'd suggest waiting until you've got a BIOS release with the final microcode, and then it should be plain sailing....

xenny

Re: Motherboard Fixes

Are you certain?/Do you have a link? The BIOS updates are typically for Spectre mitigation.

All the meltdown patch does is stop mapping the kernel into each application's address space.

The BIOS updates contain fresh microcode to allow finer control of branch prediction to make Spectre mitigation easer.

Microsoft patches Windows to cool off Intel's Meltdown – wait, antivirus? Slow your roll

xenny

It's set automatically if your AV including Defender is compatible

xenny

Re: Doesn't matter

There's a microcode component to the spectre mitigations. See https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/01/Intel-Analysis-of-Speculative-Execution-Side-Channels.pdf

If at first you don't succeed, you're Microsoft trying to fix broken Excel 2016

xenny

Re: When the only tool you have is Excel

32 Bit Excel 2013 and 2016 patched up to date support 4GB of RAM if run on 64 bit Windows. 3GB if you must run it on 32 bit windows. See https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3160741/large-address-aware-capability-change-for-excel for details.

SpaceX's Musk: We'll reuse today's Falcon 9 rocket within 2 months

xenny

Re: Pricing's gonna change...

They'll still need to produce 2nd stages, which use the same tooling - one advantage of a common tank diameter.

The work force released by making fewer Falcon 9 first stages is now avaialbe to start making MCT parts. I suspect this is why Musk is now ready to release the plans for that project - he's got the skilled workforce avaialble to get started on enacting them..

Mystery Kindle update will block readers from books after Wednesday

xenny

Re: OTA vs USB

What are tablets and e-readers if not computers, abacuses with fancy displays?

AMD to fix slippery hypervisor-busting bug in its CPU microcode

xenny

Re: I'd have assumed that their test code suite would catch something like that...

I'm unhappy about the latter, but then I consider the recent history of Intel CPU bugs that have been discovered, admittedly more in computational accuracy than basic stack operation, and I wonder about the test process in both cases.

I do remember one of the P4 architects describing how they could no longer mentally anticipate how the CPU was going to behave in some circumstances though, so maybe this kind of thing is now just really really hard, and I don't have a good enough understanding of how one might go about designing a test suite.

The Mad Men's monster is losing the botnet fight: Fewer humans are seeing web ads

xenny

Re: And I still don't understand

Many of us have met these people who enter that draw. I sometimes call them users.

The fracking oil price drop whacked Panasas – who's next in energy IT?

xenny

Re: Who's next?

If we're wishing for the moon, I'll wish for a direct environmentalist->energy converter.

That taboo is going to be insanely hard to break.

xenny

Re: Who's next?

Even with synthetic fuel, there's a lot of energy tied up in fossil fuels that would need to come from somewhere in a synthesis process, so it wouldn't/couldn't be an easy fix.

Boeing's X-Wing 737 makes first flight

xenny

Re: Less drag, not more lift

NASA seem pretty confident it's drag:

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/winglets.html

The winglets themselves are near enough vertical, so they don't really increase projected wing area.

xenny

Less drag, not more lift

The benefit of the winglets is a reduction in what's called 'induced' drag rather than any increase in lift.

They do this by reducing the strength of the tip vortices (and presumably the amount of energy transferred to them, hence helping efficiency).

Most of the world still dependent on cash

xenny

Re: nowt wrong with cash

Given the growing prevalence of negative interest rates (although they've yet to reach the consumer in most countries) Cash in the matress may start losing value more slowly than cash in the bank.

I wonder if one appeal of moving to cashless societies is that it makes it more practical to deploy negative interest rates come the next economic downturn, as it looks as if they're never going to raise them much if this one ever really finishes.

2015 Fiat 500 fashionista, complete with facelift

xenny

Outside the urban. Driving at higher, although not IIRC just motorway speeds

Microsoft kills TWO Hacking Team vulns: NOT the worst in this Patch Tues either

xenny

Re: What can the numbers tell us?

The no of patches/month doesn't seem to be decreasing, so some variant of infinity, although the end of the universe will prevent them all being patched.

What kind of infinity needs more maths than I know.

What? EMEA PC sales dropped by HOW much?

xenny

Have you considered the slow Android Studio compilations may be CPU bound?

Number 5 is alive! VirtualBox the fifth debuts

xenny

Para-virt settings

I found I had to explicitly enable these for each of my VMs. Setting default seems to result in it successfully offering hyper-v mode to windows guests and Kim to Linux guests, which was nice.

xenny

Re: VirtualBox RPMs have the version number in the package name field

I had scaling problems which went away when I updated the box guest additions, or whatever they are called.

xenny

Re: Bi-directional! Schmectional!

You need to enable it in the vm's settings

BUZZKILL. Honeybees are dying in DROVES - and here's a reason why

xenny

This year 40% died out. Last year 23% died out. That seems pretty close to the 30% per year average the article considers normal.

New Windows 10 will STAGGER to its feet, says Microsoft OS veep

xenny

Re: Tech enthusiast, not necessarily IT.

I have a horrid feeling you'll never read this, but you can drag Metro apps down to take up say 1/3 of the screen, leaving the classic windows desktop taking up the other 2/3. No need for a second monitor at all

KABOOM! Billionaire fingers dud valve in ROCKET WIBBLE PRANG BLAST

xenny

Re: Parachutes

BTDT. They tried parachutes with the Falcon 1. They presumably decided they prefer powered landings, possibly for the potentially better accuracy.

As an aside, note that thrust to weight in this process is greater than 1. The rocket never hovers, but must come to a halt at the bottom of decent as it touches the pad for everything to succeed.

El Reg regains atomic keyring capability

xenny

Re: Try lithium deuteride instead

It turns out that tritium is actually rather handy for getting better performance out of a typical nuclear weapon, which in turn lets you build a smaller/lighter thermonuclear weapon.

Russia considers keeping its own half of the ISS alive after 2024

xenny

Re: That reminds me, I saw 2001 the other evening

Trouble is, without the motivation of making better sticks to hit the other monkeys, we wouldn't have got this far technologically :-/

'Utterly unusable' MS Word dumped by SciFi author Charles Stross

xenny

Because the mindless drones return the Word document with tracked changes which need reviewing before you can import it into Scrivener for the structural changes you may need to make?

SpaceX HOVER-SHIP landing scuppered by MASSIVE ocean waves

xenny

Quite a few. The centre stage of a Falcon Heavy may end up much further downrange than that of a Falcon 9, at which point not having to do a large U-turn will save lots of fuel/payload.

Why 1.6 million people will miss Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 date with fate

xenny

Re: What I've found...

How are you replacing the off site backup the tapes allowed?

BITE that APPLE if you want to escape the Android garden, Microsoft

xenny

Re: MS wants users

Apple's profitability isn't relevant.

However the App store appears to pay more to developers than Google Play.

That is relevant, although possibly less significant than the relative likelihood of Apple v Android users spending money on O365 subscriptions.

Is Windows RT not invited to the Windows 10 upgrade party?

xenny

I really rather like my RT tablet. Battery life is good, and apart from the lack of Macro support, the Office implementation is of course excellent. The icing on the cake is that x86 malware goes nowhere.

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