* Posts by GBE

614 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Sep 2010

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Boeing warns SLS staff that job cuts could be on the way

GBE

Re: The only way to send astronauts to the Moon for now?

The puzzling thing is: Sixty years ago, while NASA was learning how to do it, there were two or three launches a year for a decade - four in 1969 alone. Now, we _know_ how to do it and yet simultaneously we seem to have forgotten how... what happened?

What happened? Budget cuts. NASA in the 60s was getting huge amounts of money. Back then NASAs spending peaked at 55B 2023 dollars — 4.4% of the federal budget. Now it's less than half that in 2023 dollars and 1/10 that as a percentage of the federal budget.

Oh, and Boing was taken over by accountants from McDonnell Douglas and lost the ability to do engineering and manufacturing.

Lightsail space tech gets tailwind from Caltech breakthrough

GBE

Re: How many femtoNewtons in a femtoWales?

«What's the official Register unit of force?»

The Norris [No] apparently 1.0 cNo = 1N (or for the heathen or the faredge rabble~0.225 lbs force)

Brilliant! Somehow I completely missed the fact that there's an offical Reg units conversion page.

GBE

How many femtoNewtons in a femtoWales?

The research team recorded a radiation pressure force of 70 fN (femtonewton or 10 [to the −15 newtons]) from a laser with the power of 110 Watts per centimeter squared, [...]

What's the official Register unit of force?

Dude, you got a Dell, period! RIP XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision

GBE

What about non-AI PCs?

"To make finding the right AI PC easy for customers, we’ve introduced three simple product categories to focus on core customer needs...

But want a non-AI PC!

I seriously doubt that "core customers" need an "AI PC."

FTC urges smart device makers to disclose software update lifecycles

GBE

Never buy anything that depnds on a server or an app

Just don't.

You're life will be far happier.

UK orders Chinese biz to sell majority stake in Scottish chipmaker

GBE

Re: Why is the order from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?

Thanks. That answers my question. I'm still a bit baffled why asking simple questions like that evoked downvotes. I had googled the duchy of lancaster, but had not managed to find that particular page.

GBE

Re: Why is the order from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?

So the answer is it has nothing to do with the Duchy of Lancaster? That just happens to be the title of the guy that gave the order?

GBE

Why is the order from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?

Can anybody explain what FTDIHL has to do with the Duchy of Lancaster?

Is that where GTDIHL is located despite FTDI itself being headquartered in Glasgow?

I can't find any mention of Glasgow on the Wikipedia page for the Duchy...

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

GBE

Otter from Animal House

Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade.

To quote Otter from Animal House:

... you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You f***ed up. You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!

Six IT contractors accused of swindling Uncle Sam out of millions

GBE

Re: Wire fraud ...

Is the definition any crime involving something with wires?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_and_wire_fraud

Softbank CEO says 'super AI' will arrive in 2035 and cost $9T

GBE

Remind me how much Softbank pissed away on cryptocurrency scams ...

And on renting out office space below cost.

WeWork never had even a remotely plausible path to profitability, but Masayoshi Son pissed $13 Billion down that rat hole.

It's about time Intel, AMD dropped x86 games and turned to the real threat

GBE

Re: "amid growing adoption of competing architectures"

They can always license the ARM architecture and get into the game at any time.

Intel already tried that (and failed). They acquired the StrongARM CPUs from DEC and then replaced them with the Intel XScale (ARMv5TE) family of processors. [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale]

Granted, they were aimed more at the embedded SoC market than the server market. They were actually a pretty decent family of parts, but were a bit on the expensive side compared to other competing ARM SoC parts. One nice thing about them is that (IIRC) they were big-endian so network-intensive stuff ran a little more efficiently.

Tesla's big reveal: Steering-wheel-free Robotaxi will charge wirelessly

GBE

Cybercab: less ugly than a Cybertruck!

I drove past a Cybertruck parked on the street in my neighborhood yesterday. This is the 3rd or 4th time I've seen one in the wild and I swear they're getting uglier. [Something I wouldn't have thought possible.]

Hey, now that I think about it, my car recharges wirelessly.

I'm futuristic!

That doomsday critical Linux bug: It's CUPS. May lead to remote hijacking of devices

GBE

Re: Is that all?

Having said that, if you're printing, you're probably using CUPS.

Yes, but you don't need to have cups-browsed running to use CUPS. I've been using CUPS for decades and have never enabled cups-browsed.

Sheesh. Kids these days and their silly auto-magical auto-discovery stuff!

GBE

Re: Judging...

If it is truly that serious, and he's getting that much push back from the developer, it must be systemd. But thankfully that doesn't affect every single Linux device, just most of them.

Nope, most Linux systems don't use systemd. Remeber: most Linux systems are phones. And they don't use systemd.

GBE

Is that all?

There people who enable cups-browsed?

I've never seen it running on any Linux machine I've used during the past 30-odd years.

That's got to be a tiny, tiny percentage of Linux systems. Hardly "affects all Linux systems and distros" as originally claimed.

GBE

Re: Its confirmed to be cups-browsed

I wonder if this is a separate issue. The cups bug says it is a DoS, while the Tweet for this 9.9 says it's a RCE.

Exactly.

And in the scope of "things that run Linux", the ones running cups-browsed comprise approximately 0%.

A DoS attack on cups-browsed doesn't sound anything at all like what the original tweet is describing.

GBE

Re: WTF is a WiFi router?

It's a combination of a router/firewall and a WAP. They're very, very common in residential installations.

And lots of them run Linux.

SBF's right-hand woman praised for testimony – and jailed for two years

GBE

Re: "You were vulnerable and you were exploited"

I guess she just had good legal advice, and unlike her co-conspirators actually had enough sense to act on it.

I'm sure some of that advice was as simple as "DON'T PISS OFF THE JUDGE!". That's got to be one of the first things they teach you in Lawyering 101.

It's amazing how many defendants seem to ignore that.

We won't name any famous defendants who've lost bigly at trial during the past year or two.

NASA's Astrobees need a new buzz – any ideas for the space-dwelling bots?

GBE

Re: A serious suggestion:

Can they be fitted with a small arm?

The Reg article says they have an arm. According to Wikepedia:

Each robot is a 12.5-inch cube with a perching arm that allows it to grasp handrails for energy conservation, to manipulate items, and assist astronauts.

Telcos scolded for unwanted erection of utility poles in race to wire up Britain

GBE

Re: Like any other superhighway

The party lines I remember were connected to a single line (wire).

Sorry, I bungle that a bit. I should have written "pair" instead of wire, and after re-reading your description a few times, I think I sort of understand what you were describing. I've never heard of that being done in the US.

GBE

Re: Like any other superhighway

You need two wires for the speech circuit, but could get adequate ring signal by using one wire of the pair and an earth return. Each subscriber had their own ring circuit, but they shared the speech circuit.

Wow, that must be some UK-specific set-up. In the US a residential POTS line is a single circuit (loop) with "loop start". There is no separate "ring circuit" and "speech circuit". It's two wires (top and ring). Tip is usually close to ground (it's usually pulled to ground at the CO) and ring is fed with a nominal -48VDC when off-hook. Placing a resistive load between tip and ring takes the loop off hook, causing the switch to allocate a voice slot and generate dial tone on top of the battery voltage. An incoming signal is 90V AC on top of the -48VDC. Once the call is set up, the voice channel is just audio AC on top of that battery voltage.

A PBX to CO connection is also a single loop but there can be some call additional call start/end supervision by grounding tip and ring in a sort of handshake. There's still only one channel for AC (dial, busy, intercept, ring, voice).

GBE

Re: Like any other superhighway

This is a myth. If a party-line was in use then you got an engaged tone.

Nonsense. At least here in the US midwest of my childhood, if you picked up a set on a partly line that was in use, you could join the conversation the same as somebody picking up an extension.

A party line was a single line used by more than one subscriber. There were multiple sets connected between that line and ground (exactly like multiple extensions are on a non-party subscriber line).

There was absolutely no physical way for the switch to send a busy tone to one set on the line when there was a call in progress on another set (or sets).

If the switch can simultaneously connect different audio to two different sets, then those two sets are not on a party line. They are on two different lines.

GBE

Re: Like any other superhighway

Party Line - the two phone wires ('A leg' and 'B leg' I think was the terminology) were connected to two houses. In one the bell and dial were wired between A leg and ground, in the other they were between B leg and ground. Hence dialling and ringing could be handled separately but the speech circuit was common.

I don't understand. If there were two wires, then why not just hook it up as two completely separate lines?

The party lines I remember were connected to a single line (wire). They were loop-start with make/break dialing (same as a normal subscriber loop). However, the electro-mechanical ringers responded to different ring frequencies. To call somebody else on your party line, you picked up the phone, dialed, and then hung up (the switch wouldn't generate a ring signal if there was a phone off-hook). Since your ringer didn't respond to the ring signal that was being generated, you had no indication when/if somebody answered. You just waited a while and then picked up the phone to see if anybody was there.

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

GBE

Re: "Extensive use of IPv4 NAT"

Lucky you, having a provider that gives you a usable IPv4 address. Unfortunately there are plenty of people who can't get one of those, because their provider has very few, because their RIR has run out. In those cases they have to use CGNAT (NAT, at ISP level) which is fine in theory, but now you're sharing an IP with thousands of other users.

Damn. That would make IPv6 seem like a good idea.

I've always had my very own IP address — dynamic though it be, it rarely changes and a free account at dynu.com deals with that. So IPv4 NAT in my firewall fits me just fine. I can open incoming ports and forward them wherever I want them to go.

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

GBE

Re: Enquiring minds need to know.

If he plays golf so much why is he so bad at it ?

I once read an article by a reporter who had talked (off-the-record) with the pros and caddies at some of Trump's course. The pros said that a couple or three decades ago he was a decent amateur golfer (they estimated he probably had a mid-high single-digit handicap) but was never as good as he (and his scorecards) claimed. And they said he's certainly not anywhere as good as he used to be (no surprise there, he's 80). The caddies had a nickname for him back in the day. They called him "Pelé". 'nuf said?

Predator spyware updated with dangerous new features, also now harder to track

GBE

Shouldn't it be "DeFiat" rather than "DeFiant"?

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, and Donald Trump's daughter Tiffany, both posted about the launch of Trump's World Liberty Financial – a crypto platform the ex-president and current Republican nominee announced in late August as "the DeFiant Ones," but apparently already renamed.

Aw, surely they should have been "The DeFiat Ones". Though maybe the intended audience would not get it.

Ubuntu Noble updates on hold while 20th anniversary teaser bears retro-styled gifts

GBE

Of course I had scheduled downtime on Saturday for the upgrade.

I sent out email to users a week or two back warning that <server> would be down for an hour or two on Saturday for the upgrade.

I dragged myself into the office on Saturday afternoon after stopping to pick up some sodas and a frozen pizza to chuck into the oven in the break room.

I sent out a final e-mail that the server would be going down in a half-hour.

After fighting with an ancient KVM for a while I got logged in at the console and did a quick last-minute backup while the pizza was baking.

Then I sat down at the console with my pizza and soda to do the actual upgrade, and presto: the do-release-upgrade says there isn't one available unless I want to force an upgrade to a "development" version with the -d flag.

WTF?

There's no GUI or web browser on that machine, and the "normal" office machines with browsers can't reach the Internet on weekends (don't ask). After futzing around to get a machine with a browser connect so it can reach the Internet, I eventually find out what happened.

Upgrade postponed...

GNU screen 5 proves it's still got game even after 37 years

GBE

I remember porting screen to Coherent

About 35 years ago, I wrote a pty driver for Mark Williams "Coherent" Unix v7 clone so that I could then port screen to Coherent.

And I still use screen regularly.

Brace for glitches and GRUB grumbles as Ubuntu 24.04.1 lands

GBE

Good riddance to os-prober

A significant change catching some upgraders off guard is that recent Ubuntu versions don't add other OSes to their GRUB menu.

Hallelujah!

I've always disabled os-prober as one of my first tasks after an install. It wasted a lot of time during upgrades and when GRUB config was changed. If/when I do have other distros on a machine I've got far better ways to boot them (the GRUB os-probed menu entries rarely worked), and all of the Ubuntu boot menu clutter was annoying at best and confusing at worst.

NASA will fly Boeing Starliner crew home with SpaceX, Calamity Capsule deemed too risky

GBE

with Boeing insisting its equipment was safe enough

with Boeing insisting its equipment was safe enough [NASA still decided not to try to bring anybody home on the Boeing Starliner]

Ha!

Like Boeing's opinion on equipment safety is something anybody is going to pay attention to.

Virginia's datacenters guzzle water like there's no tomorrow, says FOI-based report

GBE

Re: What are they doing with it?

<blockqutoe>So what are these datacentres doing with all the water they are "using"?</blockqutoe>

My guess is that they don't run the warm water through a radiator or cooling tower to cool it off and then recirculate it. IOW, they only use water as an occasional backup cooling mechanism and it comes out of the tap, through the computers or heat-exchangers, and then down the drain.

Half the plumbing, half the installation expense! Water's free, right?

NASA gives Falcon 9 thumbs-up to launch Crew-9

GBE

Re: Just give up on Starliner already.

For mercy's sake, take the Boeing Starliner project out behind the barn and put it out of its our misery. — FTFY

Well, there was considerable schadenfreude value in the ultra slow-motion Starliner debacle, but certainly not enough to justify the price tag.

GBE

Redundant things are there for a reason.

Walker went on to explain that the line was redundant and could simply be removed – a design change that has already been tested at the company's McGregor facility.

Keep something that's redundant? Something like a redundant angle-of-attack sensor? Surely no need for that — just ask Boeing.

Redundancy is designed into things like airliners and spacecraft for a reason.

GBE

Just give up on Starliner already.

The confirmation that it will be at least a year before Boeing's Starliner will fly again is disappointing [...]

For mercy's sake, take the Boeing Starliner project out behind the barn and put it out of its misery.

AI models face collapse if they overdose on their own output

GBE

Re: "using AI-generated datasets to train future models may generate gibberish"

>> Why did anyone think the output would improve if the next generation of models were trained on the ones that were already crap.

> Did anyone actually think that? (Perhaps you can point them out to us, so we can avoid accidentally breeding with them.)

I believe that was intended as a somewhat sarcastic rhetorical question. Clearly nobody with more than five firing neurons really thought that.

China pushes for network upgrade blitz as IPv6 adoption slows

GBE

Re: The year of IPv6 on the CPE was twelve years ago

No, the weakest links in the chain are ISPs...

What he said.

I'm on my third or fourth generation of IPv6 capable firewall/router/WAP. But my ISP doesn't support IPv6 for residential customers. I've got symmetric 500Mbit optical fiber service (for another $20 a month, I could have 1Gb), but I can't use IPv6. I don't really care, because I haven't run across a real reason to use IPv6. However, 10-15 years ago I'd have bet I would be using IPv6 long before I had the option of (affordable) symmetric 1Gb optical fiber service at home.

The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard

GBE

Re: Heavy Enough to Bludgeon

Reminds me of my first experience of computers via an ASR-33 teletype

The problem with the ASR33 was finding a tub of oil big enough to dunk them in as part of the routine maintenace procedure. I still remember the oil stains on the backpacks of students carrying around rolls of paper tape with their programs on them.

Kids these days — spoilt rotten with those fancy new 7-bit ASCII teletype machines. Back in the day, real programmers used 5-bit Baudot.

I remember one lab assignment was to write a 6502 assembly language program for a Rockwell KIM-1 that when fed a 5-bit baudot tape via reader on one serial port would output 7-bit ASCII to a teletype on a second serial port. I think it also displayed the text (as best you could with 7-segment LEDs) as it sent the output to the teletype.

SoftBank boss says 'artificial superintelligence' could be three years away

GBE

Yea, and WeWork is the future.

Remember, this is the guy who thought WeWork had figured out how to magic money out of nowhere.

Meta warns bit flips, other hardware faults cause AI errors

GBE

Forget about it Jake...

It's Meta.

They're lying. <slap>

They're incompetent. <slap>

They're lying. <slap>

They're incompetent. <slap>

...

DARPA searched for fields quantum computers really could revolutionize, with mixed results

GBE

Blockchain!

I don't really understand the question, but I've been assured that the answer is blockchain.

Satellite phone service could soon become the norm

GBE

Re: "a pragmatic means of network extension"

Call quality hasn't been good since the analog cell towers were shut down. Sure, they had other problems (the biggest being that every call was available for anybody to listen to) but voice quality was excellent.

I did both mobile and cell-site radio HW design (including audio chains) during the analog era, and we thought audio quality was important back then. The requirement was to be as good as local landline calls, but the goal was to be even better than landline. That attitude vanished quickly when the switch to digital happened. The new attitude was "if we squeeze the bit bit rate for the codecs down a bit lower, we can support a few more calls". People will put up with it, because the competition is doing the same. So the race to the bottom began. And continues...

Amtrak confirms crooks are breaking into accounts using creds swiped from other DBs

GBE

Worlds largest?

Amtrak Guest Rewards is a free program available to Americans who actually use the rail system, the world's largest,

The "world's largest" surprised me. Largest using what measurement?

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

GBE

Re: "The thrust is that retaining Musk's extraordinary talent takes extraordinary compensation"

You forgot

[6] Goes into perpetual paranoid right-wing wacko mode — offending and driving away the main demographic that's buying electric vehicles.

I've certainly crossed Tesla of my list of cars to look at, and a large part of that decision is based on wanting in no way to provide support for or be associated with Elon Musk.

Boffins suggest astronauts should build a Wall of Death on the Moon

GBE

The assertion that Neanderthal and human hybrids were infertile is incorrect,

Look again. The claim was that they were interfertile.

Unintended acceleration leads to recall of every Cybertruck produced so far

GBE

"Acceleration" is change in velocity - in either direction. Sorry for being a jerk

No, jerk is change in acceleration (third derivative of position with respect to time).

Sorry for being a pedant.

(Not really)

FTX crypto-crook Sam Bankman-Fried gets 25 years in prison

GBE

I'd happily do a week inside if it meant I could have over $6 million to burn through

When sent to prison for fraud/theft you don't get to keep what you stole. His sentence also includes the requirement to forfeit more than $11 billion.

You'd spend the rest of your life trying to repay that $6 million.

Hyperfluorescent OLEDs promise more efficient displays that won't make you so blue

GBE

Re: lasers?

Will this help build a more efficient laser rifle?

I hope so. Efforts to improve the efficiency of the shark have failed miserably.

SoftIron rolls its own server virt stack to join the 'let's get VMware' crowd

GBE

It means the bits squirt out of the ground on their own — you don't have to use a pump.

No, wait...

Truck-to-truck worm could infect – and disrupt – entire US commercial fleet

GBE

Re: There's a very simple fix that can't be bypassed

Great idea, the only minor snag with it is that CAN is a bi-directional bus that uses differential signaling over two wires only so there is no dedicated TX pin as such and cutting the connection would isolate the ELDs from the CAN network thus rendering it completely unable to monitor the vehicle systems.

If the transceiver is separate from the µController, there will be a tx-enable and/or separate rx/tx data pins, so it it should be possible to cut a trace on the board and turn it into a rx-only device.

If the transceiver is integrated into the µController (didn't used to be a thing, especially for automotive), then that's not possible.

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