Posts by cyberdemon

Tesla sales crash in Europe, UK. We can only wonder why

Re: Not really a time to be owning a Tesla

The cars, the company, the fanbase.

And soon: The USA

Re: Tesla was all about PR

Are you sure that the Tesla forums are populated by real people? Or is it just an automated massage booth for Twitler's monstrous ego?

Re: Tesla was all about PR

And as the first poster alluded to, so was Gerald Ratner :)

He just didn't know it until he told the public that the only way he could make money from his cheap tat was "because it's total crap"

US cranks up espionage charges against ex-Googler accused of trade secrets heist

Re: Throw the book at 'im.

Kant?

Re: The middle kingdom does like a bit of IP

And I'm learning Chinese, said Wernher von Braun

You know something's wrong when Clippy fills you with nostalgia for simpler times

Good Grief

The AI impression of itself is as some kind of demonic tick, with fish-hooks for arms, with which to painfully latch on to you, never to be removed

Surely, the stuff of nightmares

Remember it'll cost ya to keep the lights on for Windows 10

Re: All this pressure

Try StereoKit (try it on Windows first, if it works for your use case on Windows, it likely will on Linux)

Also try Monado - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39324908

If that fails, buy a HTC device

OpenAI, Microsoft urge judge to toss out Musk's 'fact-free' lawsuit

Re: Can they all lose?

They will. Only the lawyers win in cases like this.

For the 94th time can I suggest a Popcorn icon?

Poisoned Go programming language package lay undetected for 3 years

You mean the one to steal crypto keys from er, at least 7 people?

Although yeah, not really taking off, which is fortunate.

What I mean is, said crypto scheme ought to be investigated as a possible source of the fake package. If they are the sole project on GitHub using it, then it is more than a little suspicious that they might not be innocent victims.

And no doubt now, with the news coverage mentioning the typosquatted URL, LLMs will be parroting it as the real URL

I am amazed that Go have not removed it yet, but then again, there are not many humans left at Google

Palantir designed to 'power the West to its obvious innate superiority,' says CEO

I didn't know ducks walked when they er ...

Ireland's AI minister has never used ChatGPT but swears she'll learn fast

Re: Normal

Or indeed, putting Ed Milliwatt in charge of Energy

Abandoned AWS S3 buckets can be reused in supply-chain attacks that would make SolarWinds look 'insignificant'

What!

I have never (and never intend to) work with Amazon S3. But what you are saying is, Amazon lets you address a storage "bucket" by name and name alone, and then when you stop paying your money, they will let anyone else register with the same name and start stealing data from your dead Android apps etc??

Shirley, they should not allow name re-use, not without some proof that you are the original owner

Or at the very least, there should be some mandatory API key authentication, and the keys obviously would be regenerated when the bucket of the expired name is created by someone else

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Re: You should never need to reboot a machine.

There are two things which can't be reloaded without a reboot:

The static-linked part of the kernel i.e. you can update kernel modules without rebooting, but not the kernel itself. (Ok there is kexec, but i'd be surprised/interested if anyone uses that in production)

Then there is PID 0 (init) which can't be killed on a UNIX/Linux system

Both of these need to be made as simple as possible to avoid the need for reboots

And that's why I find it so perverse that PID 0 is picking up so much bloat in systemd

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

Re: I give up

Can you link to the forum post that describes your issue?

TBH as mentioned earlier i have little personal experience with Mint and always use Debian. It has a very reliable install process for me, but still it could perhaps be offputting for the average member of the public, because it is designed to be flexible for power users

Re: Linux "Just Didn't Work"

Then there must either be a hardware problem or it's a very unusual rodent. What 'driver' did you try to install? (It shouldn't need one, and trying to install a special one could be why it is broken).

It should show up in 'lsusb' as a USB Human Interface Device, and 'hd /dev/input/mice' should print hex to the terminal when you move it. If all that is as normal, then it's perhaps an issue with the display manager and not the mouse. If you are using Wayland, try xorg instead

In any case, i'm surprised and disappointed, and frustrated because whatever it is is fixable.

Do other mice work on the same system? Does this mouse work on other systems (without special drivers)? What mouse is it?

Edit: ignore all that, just read your other post, glad it is working

Re: Linux "Just Didn't Work"

Bluetooth mouse? You probably want the Bluetooth menu rather than 'drivers'.. And you need to put the mouse into it's pairing mode, etc. It can be a faff initially, but no more so than on Windows, at least when Bluetooth itself is working. (My experience is with KDE on Debian, and it my Bluetooth MX Master 'just worked')

Any mice i have used have been either USB HID (no driver needed) or Bluetooth, what is yours?

Re: Biased, moi?

> telemetry is data which makes it possible to provide a better quality of product - so this a good thing

I would reply properly, but I really can't be bothered. Have a downvote instead

Nautilus

I agree with you there. But notice how very few in this thread are advocating GNOME.

There's always a better alternative, don't just take the first thing you see and assume it's all shit. Try KDE with its Dolphin file manager, it's like Windows Explorer used to be, but better.

Re: Don't expect older hardware to work for very long

• 1. Not (necessarily) so. Nvidia for example have moved most of their driver functionality to firmware, so the drivers since that change at least, are likely to have much longer-term support. AMD have fully open-source drivers that are actually good.
• 2. Depends what you mean by "older software" - older Windows software tends to run better on Wine than it does on Windows. If it's an older piece of FOSS that has gone out of maintenance, then OK, you might need to compile it. Older closed-source Linux app that has gone out of support (a pretty rare beast) you might need a chroot or a LD_LIBRARY_PATH tweak, but you certainly can do it without resorting to a VM
• 3. see 1.
• 4. There is plenty of support available - it just tends to be online. This is just a critical-mass thing, and I foresee more (or at least a higher proportion of, since computers and computer shops are in decline) computer shops offering Linux support in future

A car is a tool, but in this age of all modern cars being "connected cars" spying on their users and requiring cloudy software updates and subscription-enabled features, would you sneer at people advocating a way around that?

Ah yes, I remember my old Renault, where the gearstick was mounted high up like a van, the handbrake was a pull-switch near the driver-side door, the dashboard was in the middle, and the radio controls were on a stick next to the wipers. All manner of things went wrong with it so I sent it to the scrap heap

Re: Windows dev tools

You can host ASP.NET directly on Linux. MS relented on this a long time ago because so many webservers are running Linux.

As for dev tools, someone else in this thread mentioned JetBrains, I use their IDEs for C++ and Python and they are great

Re: Yada Yada Yada

Would mapnik work for your use case? Although for mountaineering, I would have thought a phone with OsmAnd would be more suitable.

Also, I have heard good things (on this thread) about OnlyOffice

Re: Question re backups @dharmOS

man dpkg-query

https://serverfault.com/questions/90400/how-to-check-for-modified-config-files-on-a-debian-system

Another (somewhat sledgehammer) suggestion is to initialise a Git repo in /etc

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

> It's ironic anyway that Linux worshippers advocates of a single unified kernel OS for everything (no choice allowed there),

Sorry, but plenty of us here are using a FreeBSD kernel with the usual GNU/"Linux" frontend, of course there is a choice allowed there!

And plenty of macOS users use the CLI - in a much higher proportion in my experience than Windows users. My "Operating Systems" lecturer at uni used macOS when teaching us about the UNIX VFS, shells, kernels, POSIX, etc.

Re: If Linux is so secure...

A USB tether is NOT the same as an unfirewalled connection - the mobile phone network will be using NAT, you do NOT get your own public IP address and you can NOT accept incoming connections.

Re: Office on the web

Macros????

Good grief, surely not, in this day and age. There are plenty of arguments to modernise your system, but you just found a Cybersecurity reason.

Maybe get some actual Project/Programme Management software? Or write your own? You could probably pay someone to make the system you need in Django or similar for much less than the price of a Primavera P6 license

Re: Question re backups

This, is probably better than what I said.

Re: Yada Yada Yada

Oh well, we tried.

Enjoy your Recall, and your Start menu ads, and your MS Edge nagscreens, and your forced updates, and your shit-slow filesystem, etc etc

Re: Question re backups

I have Debian installed, with most things on LVM (Logical Volume Manager, similar to the one in Windows but a lot more powerful) including / (aka the root filesystem - kind of like C:, but in Linux, everything forms one hierarchy with filesystems 'mounted' as directories, with root at the top) Only /boot and the damned "UEFI system partition" are 'physical' partitions, because those are the things that the bootloader and "bios" need.

I have a LV for / and one for /usr ( /usr is roughly equivalent to "Program Files") another for /var (kind of like C:\ProgramData) and /home (a bit like C:\Users or your E:)

I don't have a special one for archive data aside from backups, if I did, I might make a mountpoint at /opt/archive or something

I also have a separate 'plaintext' disk with LVs for /opt/steam (my Steam library) and /mnt/backup (backups being optionally encrypted separately, and can easily be thrown onto a removable disk)

But two nice features about LVM is that the partitions are resizable at runtime (if I run out of space, I can just allocate some more) and it also supports snapshots, whereby data is frozen in its current state and it stores the difference, again doable at runtime. I'm sure there are some GUI tools for managing them, apparently lvm2-gui is a thing but I haven't used it personally.

You can either use a snapshot temporarily to create a static backup (a bit like 'volume shadow copy'), or use it permanently, (a bit like a system restore point).

But for /home (C:\Users) i would use an additional file-based backup tool like 'BorgBackup' or one of many GUI tools, and/or Syncthing to another PC/NAS

Windows 11 stages a comeback – still miles behind older sibling

This.

Which also suggests it is corporates driving the adoption of W11 (due to the need of support, device provisioning, evil group policy, snooping on employees etc and MS indoctrination of IT/HR admins) wheras when people actually have a choice, i.e. at home, users still prefer W10

Trump’s tariffs, cuts may well put tech in a chokehold, say analysts

Re: That's the point

It depends how big and how deeply bankrupted the country is. If it is Great Depression or Weimar Republic level of bankruptcy, only one thing can result, and it is messy to say the least.

Welsh woman fined for flatulence-fueled cyber harassment

They couldn't resist the opportunity for a few 'explosive' flatulence-based puns, but I agree they parped on about it a bit too long

Then again, the Reg often has articles about Wind and Biogas, this could come under their unclean energy topic

And in any case, it is in the erm, buttnotes section.

.. I'll get me coat

WFH with privacy? 85% of Brit bosses snoop on staff

Re: Well if they are tracking me

You forgot 'Reading and posting on the Reg'

Might I suggest

That employers at least be required to declare these practices to job applicants at a very early application stage

Job applicants who don't consent to it shouldn't have to fight a sunk cost fallacy i.e. "I wouldn't have applied for the job had I known this, but I can't risk turning it down now and waiting for an offer from someone else"

That way, employers who use excessive surveillance can a) find the people they really want or b) be penalised by way having of zero good quality applicants

Want Intel in your Surface? That’ll be $400 extra, says Microsoft

Re: Why would anyone want any Microsoft Surface?

They always have been.. See Surface RT, Windows Phone, etc..

Useless, compared to an AMD or Intel device equipped with Linux/Wine, or indeed an Arm device with no trace of Microsoft shitware whatsoever, for those with no need for legacy software

They are trapped in a valley of doom with this, I fea.. rejoice

What better place to inject OpenAI's o1 than Los Alamos national lab, right?

Frankly, I am a just a little bit worried that the attendees of Trump's inauguration (Billionaires who are already spending Billions on constructing their own personal bunkers in New Zealand, and perhaps Greenland next) might have a dastardly plan inspired by Hugo Drax of Moonraker fame, whereby they see the world as having too many humans in it, and wish to start World War Three (which they are certainly in a position to do) and retire to their bunkers with some 'perfect specimens of humanity' so that they may inherit the Earth

Said apocalypse could be survivable if killer robots, AI engineered disease, and/or sudden technological collapse were used, rather than nuclear weapons.

Re: Midnight

How about a nice game of Chess

Memories fade. Archives burn. All signal eventually becomes noise

Re: DRM is the biggest threat to conservation

The same, indeed applies to software.

If you have an old piece of software whose vendor/author is long dead, you can usually get it working somehow, in Wine or in a VM for example. But if it used DRM, you are shit out of luck.

e.g. my dad uses a PC "Virtual Pipe Organ" called Hauptwerk. It's vendor is still around, but only supports a newer version that my dad would have to pay again for, and wouldn't get along with the new interface anyway. His old version uses a USB Sentinel HASP DRM dongle, and although the program works perfectly in Wine including MIDI input etc, it will only function in trial mode, due to Wine not seeing the DRM dongle (actually, I will give it another try since there have been improvements to WineUSB since I last tried, but it's pretty doubtful since the DRM uses a system service, and possibly a Windows kernel-mode driver)

So when Microsoft kills Win10, he might not be able to play his sampled copy of Salisbury Cathedral anymore, which would be sad.

Tesla's numbers disappoint again ... and the crowd goes wild ... again

"But I'm telling you, there's a damn wolf this time and you can drive it."

Is Musk trying to say that his muskmobiles now identify as Wolves?

Someone should tell the President!

A good kind of disorder: Boffins boost capacitor tech by disturbing dipoles

Re: Applications?

Smaller, more powerful SMPS enabling things like higher voltage on USB-C to charge phones quicker, would be one.

Re: Transportation

No overhead wires at all? Or just between gantry sections?

Re: Breakdown?

One thing I forgot to mention is ripple current i.e. the average charge and discharge current, which depends on the frequency, capacitance and depth of discharge. You can use a cap within its voltage rating but if you charge and discharge at too high a frequency then it will age faster, higher still and it will overheat and fail. Again all this will be on the datasheet from any reputable manufacturer

Re: Breakdown?

Everything fails eventually, especially capacitors, and especially bulk storage capacitors i.e. where there is a space/cost constraint against the energy they need to store

Ceramic and Tantalum caps can suffer dendritic growth, which kills them over time if they are used close to their max voltage rating. To make caps last longer, you can overspecify their voltage rating but that adds cost and size. Temperature is also a factor, and the manufacturer will have a reliability curve and a special more expensive series for extended temperature range.

Any caps connected to the mains e.g. on the hot end of power supplies will experience transients that could exceed their rating too.

Is it catastrophic? For tant/mlcc usually yes. They can fail short and explode violently. Electrolytics are usually a bit more forgiving and tend to fail open

HV MLCCs (multilayer ceramic caps) are especially prone to failure near their voltage rating, because they are strings of capacitors in series. The smallest mistolerance in manufacturing, or cycle aging, can mean that one cap in the stack gets a higher voltage than the others, it then fails short, the others then see a proportionally higher voltage, and then you can get a cascade effect

frustration-modulated

A good description for all of us these days

Spending watchdog blasts UK govt over sloth-like progress to shore up IT defenses

Re: That was a world beating pledge.

> Private sector staff are overpaid.

The execs, senior manglement and shareholders are overpaid. The actual staff get a tiny fraction of the hourly rate charged to the government by their bosses.

Tiny Linux kernel tweak could cut datacenter power use by 30%, boffins say

Re: Kernel

Exactly, but that's NOT what the headline, the article, or the original linked-to article from the University says.

> Researchers at the Cheriton School of Computer Science have developed a small modification to the Linux kernel that could reduce energy consumption in data centres by as much as 30 per cent. The update has the potential to cut the environmental impact of data centres significantly, as computing accounts for as much as 5 per cent of the world’s daily energy use.

That could lead naiive and nontechnical readers to believe that this could save almost 2% of global energy use, which is of course nonsense

Re: Kernel

Well true, but I am also skeptical about the headline claim, unless it is specifically talking about routers and perhaps fileservers, rather than servers in general.

It certainly wouldn't make a dent in "datacenter power use" on a global scale, since that figure is utterly swamped by AI malarkey.

Startup plugs AI datacenters into biogas-powered energy

Putting the Bit Barn into an actual Barn

Great..

Although I do fear the day when the machines start herding us all into biogas oubliettes to be 'digested' for fuel.

Guess who left a database wide open, exposing chat logs, API keys, and more? Yup, DeepSeek

Remember kids

The Cloud is Somebody Else's Computer, Your Data is Their Data, and now apparently, Anybody's data.