Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Who? What? Your post makes no sense.
I assume you're talking about this guy: https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/01/leo_apotheker_autonomy_trial/
(Due Diligence? Isn't that Dilbert's job?)
But what do you mean by "Too many californian criminals got hurt by leo's blunders"
Don't neural networks require the input to be of a given shape (i.e. dimensionality) and size?
And wouldn't trying to train a general model be horrendously inefficient?
I wonder how much leccy zuckerborg has spaffed on this pointless exercise, at a time when we are struggling to heat our homes, and (presumably) California is struggling to generate enough power on its grid to run the air con in summer, the poor buggers.
Mine's a good old Bakolite -encased electromechanical meter. They can pry it out of my cold, dead hands, frankly.
That one doesn't over-read by a factor of five when driving any DC load without active PFC.
The 'smart' meters, especially the old ones, weren't "True RMS" - they had a single sample point, at the top of the AC waveform, and made an assumption that the current was sinusoidal and in-phase with the voltage.
But what happens when you have a bridge rectifier and a capacitor on the mains-end of your load? All the current is concentrated at the top of the voltage waveform, where the diodes are in conduction. So you could be severely overcharged for LED lighting, as well as a lot of IT equipment.
That's for paedophiles, terrorists, and liberal democrats.
(I predict that soon it will be illegal to have a jailbroken phone.. And not long after that it will be illegal to run any software that wasn't signed by a megacorp. It will be considered theft to fail to send your data to Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, or Google)
Even now, Linux Distros tend to require a signing key from Microsoft to boot on EFI.
Secure boot and "trusted computing" was always (IMO) for the purpose of locking down the hardware against "unauthorised modification" by its tenant "owner", and that included making it difficult to install an operating system other than Microsoft Windows (or Apple OSX in the case of Apple hardware, which IIRC was first to adopt TPMs).
And for those users who have modified their PCs, microsoft and chums would like to lock them out of DRM'd software and digital content, including games (where it will be under the guise of anti-cheat measures).
I fully expect Microsoft's recent purchase of Activision/Blizzard to introduce mandatory TPM checks. You can certainly forget about future compatibility with Wine/Proton.
Errr, when an electrolytic capacitor is connected backwards, it usually explodes pretty much immediately after applying power..
Nowhere in TFA do I see it mentioned that they were "happily working in users' systems" but I haven't checked Reddit, obviously.
Although it DOES say "may cause debug error code 53, no post, or motherboard components damage" - all of which can be detected by testing at least to POST, at the factory.
Never mind ERC (electrical rules check is a schematic analysis that would not have caught a capacitor fitted backwards by the pick n place machine) but does nobody apply power to the boards before they leave the factory? Aren't they supposed to have a self-test in the BIOS that would at least say "no CPU or RAM installed, but i'm otherwise OK" ?
Heh. You are right about the pagefile, it is indeed possible to ask Windows not to use one (but apparently performance degrades if you do - according to Microsoft you're supposed to leave the pagefile enabled, even if you have an SSD and plenty of RAM).
But one thing windows CANNOT do is to run with a read-only C: drive. There is a horrible hack in the so-called "Windows Embedded" to try and disable most disk writes by copy-on-write to RAM, but the physical disk has to be read-write otherwise windows panics.
Whereas in Linux (especially embedded) it is perfectly normal to set all file systems read-only. There's even a handy shortcut key (alt+sysrq+u) to do it.
Why in gods name would you put Windows on an Eee PC? Weren't they supposed to come with Linux?
Not really, no.
Android still needs endless updates for stuff that would never be used by a digital signage system, is a right pain in the arse to build, doesn't easily support external framebuffer devices, and has too many features that would need to be turned off e.g. power management, lock screen, home screen, notifications, telephony, user accounts.. etc. It could possibly be even worse than Windows.
The obvious solution would be embedded Linux (e.g. Yocto), with the signage application (perhaps based on a HTML5 renderer) writing directly to a raw framebuffer device. And I suspect/hope that the only reason we don't see any of those, is because they don't display hilarious giant size error messages when they go wrong, and so do not go on to be featured in "Bork! Bork! Bork!" (or indeed the 12 Borks of Christmas).
When they do (rarely) go wrong, the screen would just freeze with the last displayed advert or go blank, and nobody except the service technician ever notices.
Why do people insist on using Windows for public signage?
If the output is a framebuffer device separate from the administration console, then it doesn't need to splurt all the gory details of its latest hardware/software error for all and sundry to point and laugh at.
It also helps if you don't use an OS that needs constant OTA updates (lest it splurge a reminder on your bork screen), can't live without a swapfile and never, EVER stops thrashing the disk.
Amanfrommars1, it's amazing how you never cease to amuse me, even though I know you are nothing more than a bucket of statistics about the English language that some twerp scraped from message boards and then had the gall to call it 'intelligence'.
I can't argue with that. The post of Home Secretary seems to be one that is only attractive to megalomanaical psychopaths (much moreso than PM).
But my point was, such a person who wishes to push Britain in the direction of a totalitarian police state resembling soviet-era east germany, would certainly NOT want the oversight of the European Parliament, the ECJ, the ECHR etc. as they are all set up primarily to prevent that kind of corrupt, oppressive system from ever being possible again.
Therefore I can only conclude that Ms May must have been a Leave supporter in disguise.
And before we stray too far off-topic: Under Priti Patel's new regime, it will soon be illegal even to protest peacefully against government corruption.
So if peaceful protest is made illegal and the crony governent are free to abuse their "sovereign" powers to line their own pockets at the expense of the nation, then future would-be peaceful protestors will have nothing to lose and everything to gain, by "setting fire to the goat" (or parliament) and escalating to violence.
No, the "Slimey Toad" May was a Leaver pretending to be a Remainer, as far as I could tell. "And look where that got us." indeed.
(I firmly believe that the only reason that Theresa May joined the Remain side was because she knew full well that everyone hated her. All her policies as Home Sec prior to Brexit time were aimed at establishing a police state in Britain, and removing that pesky Human Rights Act)
I don't know what the hell Truss is nor what she is pretending to be.. Except a clown pretending to be a government minister. She could be a Russian stooge for all I can see (along with cummings, Raaaab Gav, Mogg et al). She and her 1922 Brexit chums are certainly furthering the Russians' goal of destabilising the west very nicely indeed.
You can't "blame the customer for being stupid enough to believe our marketing drivel / lies" - The reason that there is a chronic lack of IT expertise / clue amongst small business owners is BECAUSE c*ts like Bezos' Bozos are pretending to have a magic wand that fixes all IT woes, when they don't. So nobody bothers to get proper IT training - the IT training colleges just tell them how to set up a bloody EC2 instance!
I think UPS failover (or supply failover in general) is a good case for DC power distribution instead of AC tbh. I often worry about the stability of our AC electricity grids.
I don't know if Amazon had DC or AC distribution in this case, but I'd place a bet that it was standard 50/60Hz AC.
The big problem with AC is that your sources all need to be in phase, so you can't easily have multiple UPSs holding up the same busbar. Normally you end up with one big inverter somewhere, which is a single point of failure.
You can still have smaller UPSs on individual servers though, and you can have redundant PSUs inside the servers themselves which use diodes as a failover mechanism. But you can only do that after it has been rectified to DC.
Any 'mission-critical' server like a disk array would "shurley" have double, if not triple redundant PSUs with separate AC busbars and separate UPSs though, so I'd be surprised if this outage was just a UPS failure. If so then some IT/electrical engineering heads could roll at Amazon.
Both above posts are true.
As someone on the spectrum, it is indeed an effort to "think and behave like a normal person". But I still have a moral compass. I know that it is wrong to cause harm to other people, but I find it hard to accept certain things as "wrong" just because someone says they are. Especially when I cannot see how they cause harm.
It also annoys me more so than it seems to annoy normal people, when the rich and powerful are able to abuse their power to get richer while causing harm, despite being technically within the law.
I disagree with the law on many issues around intellectual property and copyright, for example. But I can see how Facebook, Tesla, Amazon, Google, Microsoft et al are causing massive harm and getting away with it, and it pisses me off.
Docker, Snap, Flatpak, Electron, SystemD ... Java ... ".NET for linux" .. WASM
To name but a few.
And every time I run NPM or PIP I think "oh god, what did I just download and run"
If there's one thing that the opening scenes of Battlestar Galactica ought to have taught us, it's that cybersecurity is impossible when all of our systems are (tightly) interconnected or centralised.
But if we isolated our systems to make them do their job AND ONLY their job, then how would the Big Tech companies get ourtheir data?
It's not just Ads that are obnoxious on the modern web, but the general trend of every webpage loading 100s of JavaScript objects (often obfuscated) from various domains. Some of which run continuously in the background with multiple worker threads, hogging my CPU, tracking my mouse (hopefully not my keyboard too), and exfiltrating as much data as they can get away with.
And the only 'person' we have to trust to tell us that all this javascript is all perfectly safe to run, is er, Google.
I run a Chrome extension called ScriptSafe. It does mean that most websites are broken at first and I have to add some third party site to the whitelist to make it functional. But I don't need an ad blocker because all the ads are invariably pulled in by some dodgy javascript from doubleclick.net or similar - don't load the script and you don't get the ads.
If any site has some nice well-behaved ads that don't slurp my data and don't require cross-domain javascript, then i'll see them and I'm happy with that.
Personally I think that websites that require javascript to perform a function that could easily be provided without it should be banned.
But if google bork ScriptSafe with this update, then I'll just have to stay on the old version of Chrome I suppose, or move to Firefox and use NoScript.. Until they break that with a similar API change because Google told them to.
> Astronaut wings should only go out to people professionally employed as astronauts who have completed one complete orbit around the Earth.
One complete orbit? A tourist could do that without much training.
I'd rather it say: Played an operational role on board a vehicle capable of EVA which reached stable orbit (or beyond).
(i.e. you need to be properly trained on the operation of a fucking complicated vehicle, in the same way as a pilot of a commercial airliner who might've earned the FAA's original badge)
This isn't a problem with Debian, it's a problem with Firefox for insisting on such a rapid release cycle even for ESR, and it's a problem with Snap/Flatpak for not playing nicely with system packages. Snap should never conflict with system packages - the whole point is to make it OS independent. Make the executable name `snap-firefox` for example.
Snap is an Ubuntu abomination that needs to die. Installing a Snap is not "updating the OS". It is installing a containerised software with all its dependencies in a very inefficient and functionally-limited way, just so that it can be independent of the OS, and "unhackable" by the user.
Installing a snap/flatpak for open source software should NEVER be necessary. It's main use case is for DRM/proprietary software, and that's why Shuttleworth is trying to foist it onto Ubuntu - he can make money from it.
There has never been a requirement for a web browser "to update the OS". But GNOME doesn't function without a web browser. So if you remove firefox, then you need to install GNOME's browser. You can't make GNOME use a Snap version of Firefox because Snap is Crap. It's containerised and GNOME simply can't access it in the way that it needs to.
(Also: The article didn't mention the obvious solution: use KDE and chromium, or use KDE and build Firefox from source.)
Spiritual Opium indeed!
Over here, our teenagers spend all their time watching utter shite on YouTube/TikTok/Twitch/etc while in China they are studying quantum electrodynamics because they already learnt vector calculus and classical mechanics in primary school.
And what can they do with quantum electrodynamics? Design sub-5nm transistors of course.
Maybe all HPC and AI "COULD" all run on a unified platform. BUT SHOULD IT?
Who would control the unified platform? Bob Page?
Obscure reference alert: A pre-millenium (1999) computer game's preminition of a billionaire head of an AI company who wants to rule the world with AI weapons (mass surveillance and walking machineguns), and wished to concentrate all of the world's communications into his all-powerful AI. He also (in the game) engineered a terrible global pandemic called the Gray Death, and sold a very limited quantity of a product called Ambrosia that merely deactivated the virus in individuals for a short time, so long as they kept paying him.
https://youtu.be/FR7yhm5obtk?t=20989
See also: Black mirror, etc.
What Rob Farber calls AI is nothing more than an energy-munching statistical machine that is only really useful for mass surveillance, manipulation and oppression, and not much else. And it needs to be curtailed, severely.
Your mum features local dimming mate.
Jokes aside: Unless you're working on a TV, no it doesn't. You would notice immediately if it did, especially in "dark mode".
Personally, I enjoy "white on black" (aka "dark mode") on my Konsole terminal in Debian. But I certainly wouldn't want it on windows notepad. Changing the aesthetic of that old stalwart would make me wonder what else they changed.. e.g. the most frequent use case I have of Notepad is when I have something in borked Unicode on my clipboard, and I need to squash it back to 7-bit ASCII.
Worse: Not only was the "proposition" vaguely worded, but the title and content of at least one of the articles was a statement that went opposite to the "proposition". So if you disagreed with the title, then you should vote "For", and if you agree with the title, you should vote "against".
IMO, the vote options themselves should have been clear statements. e.g.
a) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is good for the environment and good for customers
b) Cloud-dependent rented hardware is bad for the environment and bad for customers
c) Nuanced/Undecided, see my answer in the comments
Interesting, I didn't know that underfloor heating could work with a flow temperature of 30 degrees, I'd have thought that at this temperature (below body temperature) you'd barely notice that it is turned on, and in in cold and windy weather it wouldn't have much chance of keeping the air warm. How many kW can an underfloor heating system put into a room if the flow is only 30 degrees? I'd hazard a guess that it would be about 100W per small-sized room, i.e. not much more actual heat than an old fashioned lightbulb (which produces heat, and gives you light for free!)
But I take your point about the psychological effect: If your feet are warm, you feel warm, so you save energy. There was a similar argument used against CFL and early LED light bulbs: The blue tinge made people feel cold so they turned the heating up!
Skirting-board heaters are just radiators without convector fins, aren't they?? How is that supposed to be any more effective/efficient?
I suppose the point is: If your house is extremely well-insulated, then you only need a very weak heating system. So a heat pump / underfloor coil will do the trick. But unfortunately in the UK, our houses are NOT well insulated at all, and cannot easily be improved.
As Mark T said: Because we can't afford to demolish and re-build our housing stock, which is what it would take here in the UK to bring them up to proper Heat Pump compatibility, with air ducts instead of radiators, forced air circulation instead of air-bricks and open vents in the loft, plastic wall-ties etc.
And even then: Our cold, damp weather really isn't suited to air-source heat pumps at all. They will ice up and be forced to enter a defrost cycle, wherein they run backwards for a short while, blowing freezing cold air back into the house to warm up the external heat exchanger. The efficiency metrics for heat pumps NEVER include the defrost cycle!
Norway has pretty dry air in winter, maybe you have less problems with ice.
How does underfloor heating help for heat pump efficiency? Isn't that just as bad, if not worse, than having radiators??
Open Source is about choice.
I run open source software (in my case, Debian GNU/Linux) because of the freedom it gives me - I know that if I don't like one solution, I can install another or write/hack my own.
I know that for this reason I will never have DRM or other "pay us to remove" anti-features in my software. And I am aware that "payment" includes surveillance data for many "free" closed-source apps. If any open source app were to start spying on people, there would be an easy solution involving a ubiquitous piece of cutleryware.
I agree that sometimes packages can be broken downstream in linux distributions, but reinstalling the operating system (even if you count debootstrap/chroot as reinstalling the OS) is never the only option. There's always a way around any problem, that's one of the most beautiful things about Open Source.
Whereas In your pre-packaged containerised world, you remove that freedom from users, by making it difficult for them to fix issues with your software by themselves, and make it more difficult for them to make it work with other pieces of software that you hadn't personally envisaged. But maybe you are flogging some closed-source, DRM-infested spyware/crapware and you don't want your customers looking too closely at what you are doing on their computers - In which case you are on the wrong platform mate, you can go and take a Running Jump.
Rather than force users to have some god-awful containerised linux system like Snap or Flatpak (or worse, Android, which just bungs a JVM on top of Linux and hides away the workings completely, and actively punishes users for trying to build applications from source - oops, you have debugging enabled - safetyNet failed, no DRM apps for you) I would prefer to educate and encourage users to build apps from source, so that they can understand how the system works, fix bugs or add missing features themselves, and contribute to the community project that they are using.
If I really don't like something in a Debian package, or some version that I want has fallen out of compatibility with my system packages, I can always run apt-get --build source [package], and fix it myself.
In order to calculate the environmental impact of "what I do for my computing needs", I need to include the amount of power that Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft et al spend rifling through the data I send them.
If I don't use the cloud, then that rather large part of my personal carbon footprint becomes zero.
And if I DID use the cloud, then I would STILL need many Gigabytes of RAM, many GFLOPs of CPU and indeed GFLOPs if not TFLOPs of GPU to run Win11 / Google Chrome / Facebook's latest VR Metaverse (cr)app, which spend so much energy on running 1000 javascript threads on every webpage, recording my every mouse-movement and eye-twitch, and rendering some shitty WebGL background that I never asked for, probably to try to sell me some advert for some piece of tat that I don't want.
Luckily, I have Linux, I have NoScript/ScriptSafe, and I don't use Facebook. Therefore my CPU and GPU can relax and throttle down (Or indeed turn OFF! What a novel concept in this age of Windows Modern Suspend..) until I actually need them to run a game, or for my own computations on my own data that I wouldn't trust anyone's damned Cloud with.
And don't tell me that running a game on someone else's computer and streaming it back to my monitor is in any way more 'green', except in terms of dollar bills for the people monetising the data.
This OS was useless from the start.
Would anyone buy a car on a buy+rent model where you pay 50+ grand up-front for the car, but also need to take out a £500/month subscription and accept regular over-the-air updates to critical and non-critical functionality, all the while signing an agreement that the manufacturer will remotely brick the car if you stop paying?
Er yes, apparently certain mugs will fall for this. They buy Tesla cars and Samsung mobile phones.
And before you whinge "But I don't pay a subscription for my samsung mobe or my tesla vehicle": Yes you do. You pay with your data. Stop sending your highly valuable surveillance data to Samsung/Tesla/Microsoft/Amazon/Google, and you have bought a brick.
