Posts by Quando

Internet Archive user info stolen in cyberattack, succumbs to DDoS

JavaScript library is enough. Avoid.

NASA pushes back missions to the ISS to buy time for Starliner analysis

Re: Options

Could they handle another 3 people on station for whatever time between crew-9 arriving and 8 leaving?

Cloudflare debuts one-click nuke of web-scraping AI

ICE

William Gibson called it ‘ICE’ - the cloud of AI generated defences around a corporation, that was tasked with repelling unwelcome connections.

Payoff from AI projects is 'dismal', biz leaders complain

Re: Over 2500 participants

Climb up the stack of turtles - software projects have been offering poor returns on spending for decades.

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

What’s the bandwidth of the radio transmission, and does that decrease with distance at the same rate?

Backblaze's geriatric hard drives kicked the bucket more in 2023

Do BackBlaze record power cycles for each drive? I suspect their drives go a long time between reboots, but it would be interesting to see if there is enough power cycling to note any correlation with failure rate.

Another interesting value would be failure rate / TB.

Maybe I should just grab the raw data and have a play - now where was that spare day I had lying around?

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

Re: Oops!

> How many times per day do you run backups on your systems?

Six, rotating between two destinations, for my main workstation.

40 years since Elite became the most fun you could have with 22 kilobytes

Re: Morals?

You must be British.

Wireless priesthood begins blessing Wi-Fi 7 hardware

Re: 40Gbps

Your Gigabit Ethernet will only ever get 120MBs (ish) max.

Using a WiFi 6 mesh I can already get 920mbs download from my ISP - mesh connects one floor of the house to the one with the ISP connection, with various wired links in the way. The big issue is that so little consumer level kit comes with anything better than 1 gigabit wired connections right now, so regardless of the internal WiFi connection the distribution to kit (desktops, NAS boxes, routers) is limited.

CERN swells storage space beyond 1EB for LHC's latest ion-whacking experiments

Has anyone, anywhere, ever asked for less bandwidth and storage?

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Re: A 1980s minicomputer at the bottom of a mine ?

“ Do we need to be collecting animals again?” - new keyboard please Sam!

Boss put project on progress bar timeline: three months … four … actually NOW!

Re: The title is no longer required.

Does the price include an annual inflation rated rise?

What's up with IT, Doc? Rabbit hole reveals cause of outage

I wish they followed the horizontal/vertical rule. Putting a kitchen shelf up in my new build UK house in 2001 I hit a cable that shouldn’t have been there. RCD times so no big drama, but still…

The builders were still on site doing the next phase of the estate so I got a supervisor to come and explain why they hadn’t followed the code, and his excuse was ‘it’s just guidance’.

Atos and Nest part company two years into 18-year £1.5bn contract

Re: awful

I agree that NS&I website is a horror, but this is about NEST the pension scheme. Different lumps of govt.

Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Most of the US runs on ‘at will’ employment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment) so employees can be fired for no reason at any time, so the takeover is just continuing the situation that existed before.

For Twitter employees in the EU there might well be a different process to go through, I know when I’ve been at companies doing mass lay-offs in the UK pre-brexit there was a 30 day consultation period, and it was roles not people that were cut - so you sometimes had a chance to try for a remaining position if they are reducing say developers from 10 to 6.

Just two die for: Apple reveals M1 Ultra chip in Mac Studio

RAM bandwidth on the M1 is 400/800GB/s (Max, Ultra), so SSD is still a lot slower. Workloads that need truly random access to large data sets will still be a problem.

Back up for a minute – Backblaze HD reliability stats show oldies can be goodies

It would be interesting to see if they have the volume of data read/written to/from each drive, and if that impacts reliability.

Google sours on legacy G Suite freeloaders, demands fee or flee

That looks nice, but then all the nice multi-label GMail features get lost don't they? And would it import 15+ years of email?

A moment of tension as the James Webb Space Telescope stretches sunshield on way to L2 destination

Re: Where is it? Check this...

All of that will push it away from the Sun - the same as the engines. 'Slow down' in this sense is reduce speed away from the Sun.

Offering Patreon subs in sterling or euros means you can be sued under GDPR, says Court of Appeal

Re: Any business

Some Patreon subscriptions listed in £'s are subject to VAT too - I have two in £'s, one gets VAT added the other doesn't. Not sure about $ subscriptions as I don't have any of those.

Boffins find way to use a standard smartphone to find hidden spy cams

Re: Haven't movie theaters been doing it for years?

Maybe it detects the lack of a hit on the wallet to pay for theirs?

AMD reveals an Epyc 50 flaws – 23 of them rated high severity. Intel has 25 bugs, too

FFS! It's almost like the people developing this stuff just don't think about security at all.

Apple says it will no longer punish those daring to repair their iPhone 13 screens

Doubt it - in ten+ years of owning many many iDevices I've needed one screen replacement (done by 3rd party) and two battery replacements (done for free by Apple).

The vast majority of devices, or owners, never go near any 3rd party repair places so would notice no difference whatsoever if they stopped servicing Apple devices.

Weeks after Red Bee Media's broadcast centre fell over, Channel 4 is still struggling with subtitles

Audio level change?

Anyone else noticed that the audio level of C4 HD seems to have changed too? Now a few levels below the BBC 1/2 HD level - find myself having to change as I switch channels when I didn't need to a few weeks ago.

Chiptune to brighten your afternoon: Winning 8-bit throwback music revealed

Just a summer holiday? Playing Spectrum games led to a 20 year career in game development!

Swift 5.5 unleashed with async keyword to fix 'pyramid of doom', plus other changes in 'massive release'

Not (currently) supported before iOS 15

The big problem with the Swift 5.5 release on Apple platforms is that there is no support for the concurrency changes on OS versions before iOS 15 / Mac OS 12, which, despite the rapid upgrade of most Apple users, still leaves those real world developers whose apps support older OS versions out in the cold. It's fine for hobbyist developers, but in the real world forcing a latest OS minimum is tough - even if 90%+ of active devices will be using it within 6 months, that last few % tend to be *very* vocal.

There are some comments from internal Apple people on the Swift forums that work is ongoing to back port the changes but no certainty that it will work, or how far back it would offer support. A lot of major third party systems still support back as far as iOS 10.0, so it will be years before they move to a minimum of 15.0 and make this usable, in the meantime they are pushing forward with a Swift 6.0 which sounds like it might also need more OS support and thus be iOS 16 as a base.

DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats sue NYC for trying to permanently cap delivery fees

Re: NYC... permanently cap delivery fees

At 5.8 g/km that must be some heavy tyres! At expected life of 10,000 to 30,000km that would be ~ 60-180 Kg of particle loss.. even split across 4 tyres that is way more than a standard tyre weighs at the start of its life.

10.8 million UK homes now have access to gigabit-capable broadband, with much of the legwork done by Virgin Media

Re: Gigabit...

The Gigabit is 1000/52. Upgraded to it about a month ago from their 350/35.

Pretty hard to get more than about 700 download out of it (probably due to my kit setup), but the upload is as specced.

So what if I pay peanuts for my home broadband? I demand you fix it NOW!

Virgin media are shifting all their phone lines to run over the fibre rather than the old real line. And yep, that does mean that it relies on the router being powered and working, and the internet connection working, to get a phone line. Ain’t progress wonderful?

1Password has none, KeePass has none... So why are there seven embedded trackers in the LastPass Android app?

Re: Not in my settings!

Not in iOS app either

Devuan adds third init option in sixth birthday release

Re: I don't have a fax, I'm Internet only these days

Seems like you comment like a fax - two copies or none....

Wine pops cork on version 6.0 of the Windows compatibility layer for *nix systems

Re: Don't forget Crossover Office

Tool is the whole Swiss Army knife, utility is just one blade.

Boffins store text message inside E coli bacteria using electromagnetic signal – and you'll never guess what it says

Re: "Hello world!" ?

Has anyone checked human DNA for what our predecessors wrote in it?

Developers! These 3 weird tricks will make you a global hero

Re: MS Windows started this

> Help is one F1 key away

Or is it?

https://genius.com/Amateur-transplants-christmas-number-12-lyrics

Dusty passports, smart tops and tracksuit bottoms: Are virtual events better or worse than the real thing?

I'm on the 'prefer virtual' side - never got a lot out of big in-person events, certainly not enough to cover trans-continental flights and hotel expenses.

The problem with virtual is timezones - trying to do a US West coast virtual conference in real time means shifting my day a lot, or just catching up the next day.

The idea of running more smaller local events appeals to me - a hundred or two at a local event would be much preferred: stream in the main event with one local host to conduct a local discussion.

Where the event is about enabling sponsors to spam people with crud then fair enough - virtual isn't going to work there when you can't force people to watch it. What a shame.

Faster optic fibers and superior laser sensors set to descend from space

Re: Dodgy

Sounds like they all need to take a drive to Barnard Castle to double check.

NHS COVID-19 app's first weekend: With fundamental testing flaw ironed out, bugs remaining are relatively trivial

Re: Critical Mass

Thanks - didn't know that!

Settings -> Exposure Notifications -> Exposure Logging Status -> Exposure Checks for anyone else hunting for it.

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

Re: No back light on a black keyboard?

I can touch type until I realise I'm doing it, then it gets all like the centipede considering how it walks...

What would you prefer: Satellite-streamed cat GIFs – or a decent early warning of an asteroid apocalypse?

Headline question

Cat GIFs obvs. And why isn’t there one in the article?

Conflict of interest? We've heard of it. Amazon on selection panel to choose UK.gov's chief digi officer

Re: Omission?

She wouldn't leave what she is currently breaking for a mere £200k...

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: Woking

I've got a huge old 1600x1200 19" CRT monitor in my loft (put there on the basis of 'might still be useful' at some point when I was upgrading), made a lovely chunky noise when powering on and de-gaussing.

Unfortunately a few years ago we had a loft ladder put in, which had the side effect of narrowing the loft entrance...and that monitor is now staying in the loft.

Samsung slows smartphone upgrade treadmill with promise to support three Android generations on Galaxies

Re: Competing with Apple

iOS 14 will run on iPhone 6S which will be 5 years old when the OS is released, although it can often be optimistic to try and use it on the lowest supported device.

On iPad they are going back to the iPad Air 2 from 2014 for iPadOS 14l

This years macOS drops support for most 2013 machines.

Until the OS has some underlying feature upgrade it's probably relatively easy to keep a device with a reasonable amount of RAM supported.

It's National Cream Tea Day and this time we end the age-old debate once and for all: How do you eat yours?

Re: Too much arguing = not enough eating

Try Chucklehead. Dry of course.

One year ago, Apple promised breakthrough features to help iPhone, iPad, Mac owners with disabilities. It failed them

The Apple voice over controls for blind/partially sighted people work excellently when the app developer implements them.

Watching a blind person navigate through the system and apps with the voice speed cranked up is something to behold.

But it is a chunk of work to implement to best quality in an app, and most devs/product owners don’t care/have the time/budget to do it.

Working from home on Virgin Media's broadband? Too bad. Outage hits English capital

Got an EE 80/20 as my backup. First I knew about the Virgin part of my setup being down was the email from UptimeRobot about it.

The EE has been reliable, but Virgin is very fast (when it works).

We spent billions building atom smashers – and now boffins think nature's doing the same thing for free?

Re: whether it might even be possible

Cherenkov Radiation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation - is what you get when a particle ends up travelling faster than the local speed of light in material that is making that lower than c. Used in neutrino detectors.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Spacecraft with graphene sails powered by starlight and lasers

Re: "The probe flew past Venus thanks to its 340kg square-shaped light sail"

IKAROS != Light Sail

Fancy some post-weekend reading? How's this for a potboiler: The source code for UK, Australia's coronavirus contact-tracing apps

>> Its a phone app! Of course its meant to be badly written and low quality.

As opposed to all those perfect websites, OS’s, embedded hardware platforms etc.?

Elevating cost-cutting to a whole new level with million-dollar bar bills

Re: Never saw a car crash into a computer

European or African?