Posts by cyberdemon

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

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

Re: Linux Upgrade Upheaval

Been using Debian for 20+ years and never had to reinstall for a major release.

Granted, that hasn't all been on the same machine, but I have machines that have gone from Woody to Lenny, Lenny to Stretch, Stretch to Bookworm.

https://www.debian.org/releases/

I am usually on Sid though, so my updates come when I want them, not just because there is a release

Re: Linux for a heavy gamer

I don't know about Oculus (i can't stand Facebook/Meta and will have nothing to do with them) but HTC Vive and Vive Pro* works perfectly out of the box with Steam (I'm running Debian, X.Org, KDE)

And I don't know about Cyberpunk, but Stalker2 which is similarly resource-heavy works as well as or better than it does on Windows, with no special tweaks. Even mods work fine. Helldivers 2, System Shock remake, returnal, Aliens Fireteam, Dead Effect 2 (VR), plenty of big games for single and multi player, I rarely find one that doesn't work. I certainly dispute your claim about "the majority of games on Steam". Just "Enable SteamPlay for all titles"

In the very rare cases where I find one that doesn't work on Linux, Steam have been kind enough to refund it, even though it was never advertised as supporting Linux or SteamPlay/Proton

* except for the WiGig wireless adapter, which uses a proprietary Intel PCIe card, which is not currently supported by Linux

Re: If Linux is so secure...

LOL, if you think Windows is so secure, why don't you dispense with your router/firewall, plug your PC directly into your fibre/dsl modem, fire up a PPPoE connection, and see what happens

Re: Gaming on Linux

Care to provide a few examples of borked games?

I'd say that simply trying a different Proton version from the drop down is hardly 'dicking around', you could try that.

No need to wedge SteamDeck onto the desktop, just enable SteamPlay (aka Proton support built-in to Steam) and play as you would on Windows.

I have several "Windows-Only" VR games that work out of the box on Linux, e.g. The Forest, Dead Effect 2, The Thrill of the Fight

Anyway I'd argue that Gaming on Linux is a superior experience, due to the horrendous experience of having to run Windows at all

Re: Couple of things that need to be set straight

...Oh.

That's a bit more than "we don't support Linux", that's more like "We unfairly discriminate against all Linux users because we think they are all cheats and hackers"

Any examples of games that are doing this? Their publishers need a talking-to.

But yes, in your earlier post, I agree it is time to ditch them, and tell your friends why

Re: Anyone else remember KDE4?

<shudders>

Yes, it was awful. I used Trinity Desktop until KDE 5 was good and ready

Well, i'd say the difference is that cars are very well standardised. There's only really one user-interface choice to make when buying a car: Automatic or Manual. And that too, thanks to EVs, is slowly becoming irrelevant. OK, EV or not EV is an important choice too, but it's one three-way choice since there are no manual EVs.

But, nowhere will you find a car with the pedals, steering or indicator/wiper controls reversed, nowhere will you find a car that uses an aeroplane-style throttle, or one so customisable that you have to buy the doors and wingmirrors separately.

I agree with the OP and our Reg columnist Liam Proven that there is poor standardisation in the Linux world, however I disagree that better standardisation would necessarily make Linux better. Linux is built by enthusiasts/tinkerers, for enthusiasts/tinkerers and that is IMO what makes it great. There will be drawbacks in that people new to the Linux world don't know who to follow and what tech to learn, but that is better than the alternative, which is to remove choice from those who want it.

Re: Sky Sports

Perhaps try Syncthing to a local NAS to avoid the need for a cloud. There is an open-source phone app for it too, which is handy for accessing phone pictures on the PC.

As for Sky Sports, I assume they don't have a web client then?

Probably you could (see icon) find an alternative distributor, and as long as you are still paying Sky for the subscription, I'd be surprised if they could make a case against you for simply watching what you have paid to watch.

Re: Linux is forever?

Personally, I would never trust a GUI to handle system upgrades. Even if I was on Windows, I would much prefer to see Windows print a log of wtf it is going to do, what it is doing, with the option to stop it. But no, all you get from Microsoft is "Hang Tight! We're getting everything ready for you!"

Re: Couple of things that need to be set straight

TBH, anti-virus is a losing battle, and comes with many drawbacks, i.e. most AVs are basically rootkits in of themselves. ClamAV is somewhat useful for scanning suspicious files, but in the days of infinitely permutable obfuscated code thanks in part to AI, as well as supply-chain attacks, you'd be a fool to rely on AV.

Run anything potentially-dodgy in a VM, monitor the network traffic and disk contents of the VM from outside. That's about the best you can do.

Re: Couple of things that need to be set straight

Just because a game "doesn't support Linux" doesn't mean you're out of luck. Check them on ProtonDB.

These days, it's a rare occasion when I find a game that doesn't work out of the box on steam. Just "apt install steam", go to options and "Enable SteamPlay for all titles" and try your favourite Windows game.

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.

DeepSeek's R1 curiously tells El Reg reader: 'My guidelines are set by OpenAI'

Re: Energy Use

Agreed, although I remain skeptical that OpenR1 will demonstrate DeepSeek's claimed training efficiency. HF are using 768 H100 GPUs, which is a lot, given that these are 1kW chips. That's the best part of a Megawatt for god knows how long. Nevertheless, for a model that size, the speculations/suspicions are that that DeepSeek may have used 50,000 H100s, which would need upwards of 50MW to run at full tilt.

But, even if they are proven to have been lying, the damage is done: They could have bought up a chunk of nvidia stock while it was 20% down, they could have gone short on Google, Meta et al. People with long positions on nvidia will have lost a lot of money (and for speculative investment bankers, I offer a tiny violin)

Some would say that's fraudulent market manipulation, others would say all's fair in love and war.

Energy Use

> You can run the models yourself, at home. On pretty limited standard PC hardware.

Er, that's true of most huge GenAI models, including Facebook's LLama. They take a "large" model that has been trained at great energy cost and would require massive memory/compute resources to run the "full" model, but they reduce the parameter count via "pruning" and quantize it down to FP4 from FP16, resulting in a shit version that will run on a raspberry pi. Nothing new there. I'm sure it could be done with GPT models too, but OpenAI choose not to, for commercial reasons rather than technical. (I have come to learn that the "Open" in "OpenAI" is meant sarcastically)

But when I say that the Chinese may have lied about their energy use, i'm not talking about the running cost so much as the training cost. If they have trained it using outputs from other LLMs, then they need the energy both for training a 671 Billion parameter model (a lot) and also the energy for generating 14.8 trillion tokens using the source models (a lot)

As I said in my earlier post, using LLMs to generate training data for LLMs is horrendously inefficient. But if you want to copy someone else's LLM and add your own censorship, all you need is a big stack of GPUs and a hell of a lot of energy.

Why would they lie? Well because a) it helps to wipe trillions off of western tech stocks and b) if they told the truth about the GPUs that they used to train it, it might prove that they are evading US sanctions

Yes, although It is possible/likely that the Chinese are simply lying about the "less energy" part

I can't think of anything more stupid and inefficient

than training an LLM on the output of another LLM

But, like cannibalism and inbreeding, it will eventually poison the whole lot of them. That's about the only good thing that could come of this. Hope in the bottom of Pandora's Box.

AI revoir, Lucie: France's answer to ChatGPT paused after faux pas overdrive

Re: "cow's eggs as a nutritious food source"

And indeed, at 170μm, cow's eggs, though nutritious, can cause microsyphilis, a potentially fatal shrinking of the skull which is then sexually transmitted.

_{(I assume what we're doing here, is training the next generation of AI)}

'Bro delete the chat': Feel the panic shortly before cops bust major online fraud ring

Scum

One hopes that the relatively lenient sentences were negotiated after being forthcoming to the NCA about their 'customers', although i'm not sure that such plea deals formally exist in the UK

Microsoft admits January's Windows Update broke USB Digital to Audio Convertor

Re: Just another reason NOT to upgrade to Win11 then...

Nothing wrong with PulseAudio for my (desktop/music listening/games) uses, it works very well

I would only consider PipeWire for low-latency audio production/performance stuff

Meta blocked Distrowatch links on Facebook while running Linux servers

openKylin

Not to defend Facebork at all, but the original deleted post wasn't about Linux generally, but specifically about openKylin, which is a somewhat-shady Chinese Linux distro that er, definitely doesn't contain malware.

The Reg article should have been clearer about that.

What IS extra shitty/incompetent though is that Facebork seem to have extended it to ban distroWatch itself, just because one of their posts was about openKylin

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Re: "How many "R"s are in the word strawberry?"

> Both Mathematica and Matlab tell me that 1 + 1 = 2. I suppose I could have worked that out myself...

> Testing on a 48 GB Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada graphics card, R1-70B at 4-bit precision required over a minute to solve for X.

I'm sure neither mathematica, matlab, or even one's own 20-Watt Brain would use anything close to 300W*60s=18kJ to solve "27 = X * 3 / 67"

If it takes you less than 15 minutes to solve this simple equation in your head, as might appear on a Year-9 SAT paper, then congratulations, your Mk1 brain has beaten the world's latest AI

AI facial recognition could sink this murder probe

Re: The usual suspects

> newly elected fire chief was revealed as being a convicted arsonist. You do have to wonder just what is going on there

What is going on there, is good old-fashioned nepotism, apparently:

"Despite Simmons’ record, he’s got emergency services in his blood. His dad, Herb Simmons, was the long-time director of the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency."

Keystone Cops

May I point out from the linked article, A man was "shot in a bathtub" and "officers found the man dead from what was initially believed to be a suspected overdose"

If these Keystone Cops struggle with the difference between a shooting and an overdose, I certainly wouldn't trust them to nab the right man

As you say, they have just seen another video, with the first having being too dark/grainy to identify a face, and said "that must be him!" Before passing it to Clearview to charge a random bloke who happened to be wearing the same colour T-shirt.

And then even if the keystone cops were right in their hunch, the chance of Clearview finding the right personentry in their database is significantly less than 1, as Clearview clearly state in their documents

I'm amazed that the case made it to court, never mind that the police are appealing to keep their shoddy evidence

DeepSeek isn't done yet with OpenAI – image-maker Janus Pro is gunning for DALL-E 3

> Crouching tiger, hidden layer(s)

Argh!

Next you'll be telling us that the CEO/Founder's name is "Hugh"

The last thing the world needs is yet another disinformation machine.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: I'll give a slightly different perspective...

Been there :(

Large Entities will give anything to not change their arcane/bizarre/(possibly corrupt) current working practices. And the salespeople from Oracle et al are highly adept at telling a customer exactly what they want to hear... Change nothing, our product is completely, nay infinitely customisable, for a small fee princely sum blank cheque. We will accommodate whatever dodgy system you have!

So naturally anyone who comes along and proposes something sensible will get sidelined. If they implement it on the side, then everyone non-manglement will love it, even lower-manglement will pretend to love it but will do nothing to support it. Upper manglement will actively poison it to get their way.

I now avoid working for Large Entities wherever possible.

Re: ****ing hell

> why the **** isn't our government (a) bringing the skill in house and (b) providing standard, modular building blocks to encourage councils to follow consistent patterns of work?

They are trying

For much, much less than the amount being spaffed on the likes of Oracle, the government could expand its own IT team to supply and maintain software for local councils.

GDS is far from perfect, but they do have some expertise. Once they've solved the problem for one council, it shouldn't be too hard to replicate it for other councils.

But then again, i'm sure the local council mob would rather keep government noses out of their business, with all the dodgy deals they've done in the past, and will to do in future. (See Private Eyes ad nauseam)

Lemmings

Indeed, and I also fail to understand how no council seems to learn from the mistakes of other councils.

i.e. this certainly wasn't the first and certainly won't be the last council to get completely and utterly shafted by the Oracle cult.

it's almost like we could do with some er, in-house IT expertise.

Sweden seizes cargo ship after another undersea cable hit in suspected sabotage

Re: You know, bad weather can sink bad ships

I thought that, until I heard that apparently the captain tried to explain that he had weighed the anchor due to "stormy conditions"

That sounds fishy, because the ship stayed on course and only slowed down a bit, and then cut the cable. If there were such an emergency that it had to lower the anchor, then they would surely have a) stopped the engines (the anchor drops from the front, so it makes no sense to drag it for stability in a storm) and b) called for help

If he had outright denied that he ever gave an order to drop the anchor, then it would be more believable i.e. someone else on board (a stowaway from the Russian port, or a bribed crewman) could have done it without the rest of the crew noticing.

Re: Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence

It's obvious yet still 'deniable'. Like shooting down passenger aircraft or planting grenades on board, shoving people out of windows, or staging a military training exercise on your border that turns into a special military operation, which turns out to be an invasion, which turns into a war

It's pretty much their M.O.

It's deliberately obvious, to try to send a message "here is the price of joining NATO and supporting Ukraine", while being just deniable enough to avoid directly triggering Article 5

Once is Happenstance, Twice is Coincidence

three Four times.. Even Sal of wgowshipping (the only youtuber whom I currently bother giving my time to) is suspicious

AI agents? Yes, let's automate all sorts of things that don't actually need it

Re: There is nothing new under the sun...

> After all, at the end of the day a computer is simply a device for making mistakes faster.

And AI is a device for making even bigger mistakes, ones that can't easily be found, corrected or exactly reproduced (unlike, say, a wonky reference in a spreadsheet) even faster

It's not just that few people "need" AI, but few trust it, for good reason. Just because it "worked" today doesn't mean it will tomorrow, and when it doesn't, you'll have a hard time fixing it

Zyxel firewalls borked by buggy update, on-site access required for fix

Yet another reason not to enable automatic updates

> those without valid security licenses are not affected

Sounds like the usual Microsoft-style approach of "pay us, and we'll break your systems first!"

I wonder if their NAS boxes are also affected

Microsoft's London 'Experience Center' packs up and goes home

> What other reaction could there have been to the Microsoft experience?

Install Linux?

Actually, that would be hilarious if someone sets up a charity to take over the premises and offer help and training to those wishing to divorce from Borkzilla

I'd donate to it, and I'm sure it would be a lot more popular!

Microsoft Experience Center

I'd prefer to go to an actual Circus with real clowns

British Museum says ex-contractor 'shut down' IT systems, wreaked havoc

Re: Closed

That was their policy for the server room, apparently!

Maybe the rogue IT bod also borked the CCTV system, so they wouldn't be able to catch the public nicking stuff from the exhibitions

Re: lax procedures

Reminds me of "Nightsleeper" - this was the only realistic cybersecurity insight of the programme.

People do daft things when they are depressed. I don't know anything about this case of course, but that would be my guess.

Perhaps he WAS the IT security team

Robots in schools, care homes next? This UK biz hopes to make that happen

Re: Elderly care facilities are actually understaffed

> Monitoring temperature and movement etc, useful for emergency alerts. Some even do chat stuff to give the illusion of not being alone.

Sounds like an interactive, "embodied" version of Oxevision (AI cameras on mental health wards)

What could possibly go wrong

Mega UK datacenter greenlit, but we still don't know who's moving in

Re: Why the obfuscation?

Same tactic as Wetherspoons when acquiring a historic old bank or opera house building to be gutted and turned into a town's shittiest pub - they will set up a shell company to buy it, because the council would object to it being sold to Wetherspoons

---> closest thing to a sticky-carpet icon

Re: If they've got a 400 MVA grid "reservation" then

And if it IS evap cooling, where are they getting the water from?

May turds and fatbergs block their inlets!

BT unplugs plans to turn old cabinets into EV chargepoints

Re: Is 1 charger for every 100 cars enough ?

TBH for a 3 mile journey, I often find that a bicycle (not even an electric one) is quicker than a car, with even mild traffic. If there's any risk of heavy traffic or parking problems then the bike is a lot more reliable

AI chatbot startup founder, lawyer wife accused of ripping off investors in $60M fraud

Shocked, SHOCKED I am!

First all-Indian chips to debut this year, 25 more local designs in the works

> we don't want your toxic hate filled money.

Glad that's settled then!

Next time I am wasting the time of a telephone scammer, I will tell him that Rameshbhai says India doesn't want our hate-filled money anyway.

.. All that bollocks you posted about grand theft by a doddering nation, I wonder if that's what the scammers tell themselves when they are swindling old grannies out of their life savings..

BTW: I have many Indian friends, and you are the first I have conversed with whom I could describe as "Toxic and hate-filled". Perhaps that's what a BJP member looks like?

FortiGate config leaks: Victims' email addresses published online

bletchleypark.org.uk on the list

Oh dear, how standards have slipped!

Microsoft throws more cash at its carbon guilt by replanting Brazilian rainforest

No.

And the required metric would be planting them *and waiting for them to grow back to useful size* faster than they are cut down

And not causing loss of habitat and biodiversity by turning natural forests into monoculture tree farms

And requiring Drax et al. to comply with the same air pollution standards (pm2.5 etc) as fossil plants are required to

And then finding something to do with the massive ash pile, composed of minerals and soil nutrients that have been permanently removed from the forest where the trees grew, thousands of miles away.. before they were chipped and dried at great energy cost and shipped across the world on Diesel-powered ships and trains

Oh and getting rid of the ridiculous carbon accounting rules that pretend the emissions occur somewhere else and thus qualify for low-carbon subsidies in the country that burns the stuff, while the country that is plundered for firewood has to pay carbon credits

It does make me wonder

How companies and energy suppliers such as Octopus can claim "100% Renewable Energy!" when on days like today, clearly that's not possible.

Yes I understand that they use ROCs or whatever to pretend they bought it at a different time than they actually did, but these things are a merrry-go-round of bullshit. E.g. how do you prove that the windfarm you bought the ROCs from hasn't just been paid Curtailment compensation meaning that the renewable energy that you "bought" at time offset x is nonexistent and shouldn't be sold as ROCs? The whole thing is about as transparent as Amazon's tax return.

Apparently we have 30GW installed Wind capacity in the UK, but I've never seen it go above 17GW. This morning it was producing 94MW i.e. 0.3% of "installed capacity".