Posts by phuzz

Micron ditches consumer memory brand Crucial to chase AI riches

Have been buying an M.2 SSD this week

Well there's your problem! You should have bought it a couple of months ago before prices started to rise.

Re: Fire sales soon?

Those AI accelerator cards are really good at the massively parallel data processing that some scientific projects need*, so hopefully a lot of them go to good homes.

*(because 'AI' is just data processing, and that's what those cards were originally designed for)

Stealthy browser extensions waited years before infecting 4.3M Chrome, Edge users with backdoors and spyware

Re: Was it really a waiting game

'Build something, get a bunch of users, then sell your company/product' is how most startups work. It's just that in this case instead of getting bought by Facebook/Google/some VC they actually got bought out by by someone malicious.

Or maybe the initial sale was legit at the time, but the buying company realised that they could make more money by installing spyware.

These days I imagine more devs would be suspicious of random buyout offers, but this was at least seven years ago and this tactic was less well known.

Baikonur's only crew-capable pad busted after Soyuz flight

Re: Ain't that convenient @NetMage

Russia's space program is in such a state, they've had to resort to buying surveillance satellites from China.

(I'm surprised there's not been more reporting on this, just for the opportunity to have a headline like "Russia buys satellites on Temu!" or similar.)

Re: On the third hand ...

It might not have been 'blown' out of place, it might have been 'sucked', by the venturi effect of the rocket blast next to it.

Tuxedo Computers slams lid on Arm Linux laptop after 18 months of pain

Huh, today I learnt a new thing. Thanks :)

Looking forward to the article

There is of course one ARM machine with great linux support: the Raspberry Pi. Not super portable though.

Cabling survived dungeons and fish factories, until a lazy user took the network down

Re: "Oh yeah, I just push it back in when it falls out"

I used to work at a PC builder, and one day the guy responsible for putting CPU's and RAM into the crate for each build order, ran out of the little antistatic boxes for putting CPUs in, so decided to help out by just installing them straight into the motherboards. Alas, he'd never install an Athlon 64 before, and didn't realise that the arrow on the CPU had to face away from the leaver on the socket (the opposite of most CPUs at the time).

He got through twenty machines, all of which went down the line and had coolers jammed on top, before the first ones hit QA and were found to not power on. Every single CPU had a bunch of mangled pins from being inserted the wrong way around.

IIRC we managed to salvage over half, by carefully bending the pins back with a knife blade.

US Navy scuttles Constellation frigate program for being too slow for tomorrow's threats

Inter-service rivalry

Clearly the US Navy didn't want to be upstaged by the US Air Force's KC-X shitshow, (wherein they took about twenty years to build aerial refuelling tankers, because they had to keep re-running the competition until Boeing won). Or the Joint Strike Fighter program which started in the late 1990's to replace a bunch of other procurement projects that hadn't gone anywhere, and took twenty years to got at least ten times over it's budget of $200 BILLION. Or maybe the US Army's Ground Combat Vehicle program, which spent a billion dollars to deliver nothing, following up on the complete failure of the Future Combat Systems project. The current boondoggle is called the Next Generation Combat Vehicle program, and is set to run until 2035, and the same companies from the last two projects will be given even more money to come up with more designs which will probably never be built.

Honestly, the US Marines need to come up with a way to waste a truly monumentally huge amount of money, because they're really dropping behind the other services in terms of procurement fuckups.

Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch that refuses to die, just went fully open source

Re: Tempting! Bit square though..

Is there anything it is really compelling for, when you already have a phone in your pocket?

Even if my phone is in my pocket (and not in the other room or something), just lifting my wrist to read the time is much easier.

Mind you, I've worn a watch since well before I had my first mobile phone, so my wrist feels weird if there's not something strapped to it.

Thunderbird 145 finally adds ‘native’ Exchange support

Re: Who uses TB with Exchange?

Shared calendars is pretty much Exchange's (and thus Outlook's) 'killer app'. I've tried a few of the alternatives, and while they mostly worked, none of them worked as well as Exchange/Outlook.

DragonFire laser to be fitted to Royal Navy ships after acing drone-zapping trials

Re: How long before ....

Tricky with aircraft, but if there's more than one ship, there'll be an area in between them where neither ship will be able to fire anything for fear of hitting the other.

Linux admin hated downtime so much he schlepped a live UPS during office move

Uptime is a measure of how long it's been since you last successfully booted.

Although this story really reminded me of these folks who transported a live server, and it's UPS, across Hamburg, together with a mobile 3G link to keep it online. On public transport, in the rain, just to make it more fun.

Oh, and the server only had one power connection, so they soldered a second power connection to the board while it was powered on.

Ford rolls into the Xen Project as hypervisor gears up for autos

I hope they also thanked Broadcom for their contribution.

Without their attacks on their own VMWare customers, less companies would even be considering Xen.

Tens of thousands more ASUS routers pwned by suspected, evolving China operation

Re: Open source alternatives

Or if you prefer your router to function well without endless fiddling, try the open source Merlin firmware for Asus routers ;)

Re: Researchers or something else

You need an American antivirus to defend yourself from Russia, then you need a Russian antivirus to defend yourself from the US, then you need a Swedish antivirus to defend yourself from Finland.

(If anyone can remember the original form of this joke, please let me know, it's surprisingly hard to search for)

Re: Surprised?

Most of Asus's routers use somewhat open source firmware, that's specifically why I bought mine.

Rust on the Moon? Far-side dirt says yes, actually

In the grand space-race narrative, it also underscores how the China National Space Administration (CNSA) is pushing sample return science into territory previously occupied by US and Soviet missions – far-side sampling, fresh soil, and new revelations.

The Soviets never landed anything on the far side of the Moon, and the best the US managed was crashing Ranger 4 into the far side. China were not only the first to soft-land on the far side, they've also brought back the only samples. They're not "pushing [...] into territory previously occupied by US and Soviet missions", they're pushing into territory the human race has never explored before.

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

Re: I ask the other way around...

Why is the default made in such a way to prefer such accidents in first place.

Because this way Amazon get more money.

Developer battled to write his own documentation, but lost the boss fight

Re: I used to own a sports bar/restaurant

Muphry's law!

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips to 2026: 'Our aim is to make it to orbit on the first try'

Re: Impressive engineering without burning money

The financials are already impressive for a company that is not reliant on feeding from the teat of government contracts.

They all rely on government contracts to stay afloat, even Rocket Lab.

(Although most SpaceX launches these days are for StarLink, so if that was a separate company paying full price for their launches, they might be able to get by without the government money)

'Windows sucks,' former Microsoft engineer says, explains how to fix it

Re: If only there was an alternative OS

To be pedantic... Mint is based on the latest Ubuntu LTS ('Long Term Service') release, and Ubuntu itself is based on Debian.

Bitcoin bandit's £5B bubble bursts as cops wrap seven-year chase

For example

Big Tech's control freak era is breaking itself apart

Re: "Investors like to see staff cuts anyway"

The reason upper management seems to be most keen on replacing staff with AI, is because they look at what AI can do, realise it can replace them very easily, and assume that's true of other staff.

So, replace the 'senior leadership team' with AI, which will remove the highest salaries from the wage bill, with no decrease in productivity, because all the workers who actually make money for the company are still employed.

Simples!

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Re: Implausible to say the least.

We had a good workaround when I was at university in the early 00's; Unusually for the UK at that point, we could get phone service from Telewest, instead of being limited to BT. Telewest actually offered free local calls, and the university had a bank of modems and fast connection to JANET. So, all the students could use the university as a free dial-up ISP, just using our university login.

After a while Telewest got wise to this, and announced they would start charging for 'data' calls, even local ones, but fortunately this happened just as they introduced a cable internet service, so for our last year we had a blisteringly fast 512kbps connection!.

Despite knowing nothing about networking, somehow we managed to share the single connection between three of us, simply by clicking different options in the Windows ME 'Network connection sharing' dialogue until it worked.

52-year-old data tape could contain only known copy of UNIX V4

Re: Damn AI!!!

It might not fit OP's needs, but BitWarden not only uses a serif font for passwords, it colours letters, numbers and symbols differently, so they really stand out.

(It's all open source, so you could set up your own server for free)

Deploying to Amazon's cloud is a pain in the AWS younger devs won't tolerate

Re: noped out in 2012 for IaaS

Don't forget the other two people you're also going to have to be paying, so that you can have out-of-hours cover all year round. You can't expect anyone to do more than one week of on call without the rest of their work suffering, and you'll need at least three people to cover holidays and illness. Oh, and you are paying them extra for being on call right?

"The cloud is just someone else's computer!" Yes. That means it's someone else getting out of bed at 3am to replace a failed disk, not me.

‘ERP down for emergency maintenance’ was code for ‘You deleted what?’

Re: What reporting system...

I'm going to guess there was exactly one (1) database user, with full access to everything. They undoubtedly had a very simple password.

This user was then used by everyone and everything.

I don't think I ever worked at this company, but I've worked at places very similar to this company

This is Doom, running headless, on Ubuntu Arm… on a satellite

I played Doom on my Amiga 1200 back in the day, and even with a CPU expansion card, it was still generally less than 10FPS. Perhaps not the most fun experience, but it's gifted me with a lifelong tolerance to low refresh rates. When someone claims "anything under 60 FPS is literally unplayable", I smile to myself; sounds like a skill issue ;)

Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease

Re: Where's the MINI?!

I fully agree, I'd much rather have a phone that was smaller in the xy dimensions, and I don't mind if it's relatively 'fat', especially if that means more battery.

The trouble is, apparently they don't sell very well. Every manufacturer that tries to build one, rarely continues it for more than a couple of generations.

I've never found a good explanation, even though comments like 'I want a smaller screen' comes up when practically any phone is mentioned, so it seems like demand is there. I guess we're just a vocal minority.

New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails

I think just mentioning 'running your own email server', was traumatic enough to cause PTSD in those poor unfortunates who have done so before.

Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day

AI can play golf now?

OpenAI releases bot-tom feeding browser with ChatGPT built in

See, I can see a 'browser with baked in AI' being useful, but only if it was the exact opposite of this.

Instead, have the AI create fake user profiles, click on random articles, and generally obfuscate what the human is actually doing, to give us more privacy. Tracking cookies would be useless if they were 90% created by AI.

The one thing AI is good for is creating plausible sounding bullshit, why not use that for good?

AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M

Of course people would notice! Their wage bill would shrink dramatically, for starters.

Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet

Re: Who knew that putting all your eggs...

Does nobody do DR trials and simulations any more?

You have budget for DR? That must be nice.

Re: DNS

Or buy (so the author gets at least a tiny bit of money), and then strip the DRM and save a copy as an epub.

Or better yet, don't buy from Amazon. (Kobo seem to have most books I want to buy)

Re: Too much in us-east-1

Of course, if data on UK citizens made it's way to the US, then the British intelligence services could then get access to it thought their sharing agreements, without worrying about any of those pesky warrants or anything.

SpaceX's Starship: Two down, Mons Huygens to climb

Look, as far as I'm concerned, Musk can go do one, but every time I read an article about how 'SpaceX will never do X', I remember the many, many, articles from a few years back saying their plan to land the first stage of the Falcon 9, and re-use it up to ten times, was completely laughably impossible.

And now Space X are launching, and landing, more rockets in a year than practically the entire rest of the world put together, (despite having someone with the emotional control of a toddler as CEO).

I wouldn't bet against them myself...

I don't see the logic of using the SLS.

The SLS is built in various different states of the US, and the Senators for those states don't want SLS to be cancelled, because then lots of people in their state would be out of work, (and probably wouldn't vote for them).

It's basically a jobs program, equivalent to paying people to dig holes, and then paying them to fill those holes back in again. Crucially, the people who control the budget for SLS, benefit from that money being spent in their states, so it's unlikely to be fully cancelled any time soon.

Re: Recap of moon return mission

And apparently it is getting a bit whiffy.

That one's easy to solve, just open all the windows for a bit.

Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice

Re: How could they not figure out the timing?

Interface with the UPS to determine when it sees its external power going offline?

Most UPS manufacturers will charge you extra for the network card that allows you to use SNMP (or whatever) to monitor the UPS. Although, it's not exactly expensive compared to the cost of the UPS, but given the level of joined-up thinking on display in this story, I wouldn't be surprised at someone OKing spending ££££ on a new UPS, but balking at spending the extra hundred quid to monitor it properly...

But thanks for reminding me I need to chase up with Eaton why one of our UPS's just dropped offline at 57% battery during a recent power failure, it's been a couple of weeks since they last replied, I think they're stumped.

SpaceX limbers up for Starship flight 11 as launch pad faces retirement

But is it really a proper rocket test until Scott Manly has analysed it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0FcQzDG3C8

Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company

Re: Come on, peoples!

"I'll document this once it's installed and working"

And as soon as it's installed and working, you get called away to fix the next most urgent problem, and the documentation never gets done.

Some variant of this is usually the problem.

Vodafone keels over, cutting off millions of mobile and broadband customers

I'm sure there was a phrase in the email announcing the merger with Three, to the effect that it would 'improve reliability'. Welp.

I was at home, on wifi, so I had absolutely no issues. Can't have problems with Vodafone's network if you're not using it *taps forehead*.

BOFH: Recover a database from five years ago? It's as easy as flicking a switch

Re: Or just use the backup data?

While it is possible to extract useful data from a basic SQL dump, but it takes a lot of guessing as to how the original designers spread information across different tables. Especially as many accounting apps were often first implemented thirty plus years ago, and have been sporadically upgraded by different teams, with completely different ideas about database design. Sometimes it's easier to resurrect the original software.

(I'm remembering one particualr product I dealt with that still had a TELEX field in their customer entries. The first ten years or so of data were in one set of tables, and then subsequent data was stored in a completely different layout, because presumably there had been some kind of upgrade. No documentation of course.)

Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build

Re: Bizarre

Microsoft are a massive company. So big in fact, that different departments have completely different aims. In this case there's one department who genuinely care about releasing open source text editing apps, and another department who are intent on shoe-horning AI into anything they can, in the (fruitless) hope that they can recoop some of the billions they've spent on it.

It makes as much sense as Sony running a record label that put rootkits on CDs, at the same time as trying to sell MiniDisc (which was basically geared towards pirating CDs). Or the BBC having both a left-wing bias, and a right-wing bias.

No account? No Windows 11, Microsoft says as another loophole snaps shut

Re: side benefit for microsoft

Only once has DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth ever fixed something for me, a corrupted Windows file. It had corrupted because the harddrive was on it's way out and soon died for good.

Texas senators cry foul over Smithsonian's pricey Space Shuttle shuffle

Re: A different angle

Well, we already know that the Shuttle is designed to also sit vertically, which would minimise the width of the load as much as possible. Plus, there's even a vehicle specifically designed to carry a shuttle vertically, which could do the whole trip in only two months!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter

Oh, plus another month to get the crawler from Florida to Washington.

Re: Pick it up

They are flown by militaries all over the globe, so there's probably a few knocking about that the US could get it's hands on. On the other hand, per wikipedia:

The developers of the Buran space vehicle programme considered using Mi-26 helicopters to "bundle" lift components for the Buran spacecraft, but test flights with a mock-up showed this to be risky and impractical

Amazon turns James Bond into the Man Without the Golden Gun

Of course, if the Bond movies were more realistic, 007 wouldn't need a gun. As a civil servant he could bludgeon his enemies to death with the all the paperwork he'd have to fill out just to get a hire car.