Posts by cyberdemon

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.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

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

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.

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.

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.

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