Posts by Zolko

When Debian won't do, Devuan 6 'Excalibur' Linux makes the grade

Re: is MX trending towards systemd?

I don't know why MX is going systemd either. I have the 23 version (Debian 12) on my laptop, and my uptimes are measured in months ! (I tend to reboot every month) And this laptop sees external screens, mouses, hard-drives, all sorts of networks, sound, bluetooth, it goes into sleep (I don't do hibernate) and wakes up reliably .... I don't know who thought that this venerable SysV-init must go.

Well, I understand that people with thousands of servers can benefit from systemd ... but then offer that as an option and don't try to ram that down the throat of everybody !

Ministry of Defence's F-35 blunder: £57B and counting

Re: Again why beancouters

F-35 was specifically designed by the US to be a way to ...

... destroy the European military aircraft industry. Worked for the UK, but is UK in Europe ?

Re: Again why beancouters

The 3-day SMO (I know you don't like it when people call it that...ODHSNM) was supposed to see all significant Ukrainian resistance overcome in three days

and exactly that happened. Russia entered Ukraine as a troll into a virgin, and they wanted to use that demonstration of force to convince NATO to stop meddling in Ukraine. Similarly to the Cuban crisis, do you remember that ? Then, when the Istanbul negotiations started, 2 weeks later, Russia retreated from some areas to show their goodwill and end the war (SMO, sorry), but the UK prime minister Brian Johnson torpedoed that accord as is documented everywhere, and that's the pojnt when the SMO transformed into the current war.

So the entire fault of the current slaughtering of Ukrainian men in uniforms is on UK/NATO : without those interventions it would all be over since a long time, without the millions of Ukrainian dead and destruction. And remember : this is not the first time that UK is responsible for a war with its millions of casualties, that happened also for the 2003 Irak war when then-prime minister Blair sided with Cheney's and Wolfowitz's lies.

I can't understand how British can try to whitewash themselves from their war-crimes.

Yes, Russia wanted Ukraine to surrender unconditionally, and that's what is going to happen anyway.

Fortytwo's decentralized AI has the answer to life, the universe, and everything

Re: AI@Home

Did you check the names ?

Ivan Nikitin and co-founders Vladyslav Larin and Alexander Firsov

don't sound very Silicon Valley-ish

You need to try all options (e.g. gradient, random, nelder-mead)

you forgot genetic algorithms. They get very fast to a very good global optimum, and don't get trapped in local minima. It's also quite easy to code. For problems with large number of parameters, this is the best algorithm I've seen.

Chatbots parrot Putin's propaganda about the illegal invasion of Ukraine

Re: In the eye of the beholder?

I think only 54% of them voted to leave Russia and join Ukraine when it held its legal and mutually agreed referendum to leave the Soviet Union. But we'll never know

logic is not your strength I see ? You pretend that we don't know something that you acknowledges yourself ! Of course we know that Crimeans don't want to be Ukrainian since Crimeans have voted repeatedly to be tied to Russia and not Ukrainia, as you observe yourself.

Re: In the eye of the beholder?

Whilst under occupation of an invading army

actually no, the Russian army was already in Crimea, as part of an agreement about the Sevastopol military base, they were not "invading" or "occupying" anything, their presence was perfectly legal. All that the Russian military did was to tell the Ukrainian military to stay in their bases and not meddle with the referendum

Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble

Re: Wrongly charged. Sexism at work.

She did not call 911 her Husband did

I saw that too : why arrest someone for a crime committed by someone else ? (even if that other someone claims that he did it because the first someone did something unexpected). And why all the downvotes : difficulty in reading/understanding ?

Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

Titanium

shortage of gas turbines

do you know what the main material of gas turbines is ? Titanium, because it is very strong and very heat resistant. Do you know what country is the main producer/exporter of titanium ?

At some point, the only thing one can consider is the stupidity of the western politicians who sanction the exact countries it is at war with and which provide the very materials – titanium or rare earth or otherwise – that the west needs to produce weapons to defeat the very enemy that provide the materials needed to make war with ... the very enemy.

And we didn't even begin to talk about pure silicium wafers to produce the very chips or the very solar panels .... or the uranium bars that the very enemy ... the only question that I don't have answers for is : do we deserve these "leaders" (leader = führer in German, literally) or did we at some point take the wrong turn ?

OpenAI releases bot-tom feeding browser with ChatGPT built in

Re: "Currently available only on MacOS"

Two types of people, those who use AI browsers, and those who don't

If I remember correctly, that should spell : "There are only 10 types of people : those who understand binary and those who don't"

China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar

Re: No mercy for using Apple

I for one don't trust any closed-source OS at all. Not even FOSS ones

ASML shrugs off China slump with faith in AI-fueled chip demand

Re: Backfire!

who would downvote this ? And why ?

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

Re: Fractional orbit

Going the extra 677m/s ...

good point : and how exactly is the next Starship going to be that much faster ? Are they bolting additional engines next time ? Burning for longer (but then, where is the extra propellant) ?

And with full 100t payload ?

China is building a thriving semi industry off US leftovers, export controls be damned

Re: @Paul Herber - In England yes.

"Magyarország" ?

Qualcomm solders Arduino to its edge AI ambitions, debuts Raspberry Pi rival

Re: The Register deserves better responses than most of these

Read the specs [...] I look forward to getting any actual arguments about this post

read the specs of WHAT ? Of the Arduino company ? The problem is that you didn't understand the article : you comment on a new board (the Uno Q) while the article talks about the acquisition of a company (Arduino) by another (Qalcom).

Re: Seriously?

Who the hell is sticking Arduino projects into commercial and industrial systems

Arduino have developed "Pro" family systems : https://store.arduino.cc/collections/pro-family

Re: No doubt many Arduino enthusiasts will be alarmed

what's the difference between them and Raspberry Pi in terms of capability ?

A Raspberry Pi is a full-blown Linux computer with an OS, while an Arduino is a micro-controller based board where you program directly on the bare metal. Arduino provides an excellent IDE for fast development, while with a Pi you're on your own in Linux-land. In terms of performance, while the initial Arduino Uno used an 8-bit microcontroller, today's Arduinos – like the Portenta family – use 32-bit Arm Cortex M4 and M33 cores with comparable computation power as earlier Raspberry Pis. The Portenta H7 has even 2 cores, allowing one for hard real-time tasks and the other for more high-level stuff (display, network ...)

If you want to control motors and sensors, an Arduino is better/easier than a Pi I think.

No doubt many Arduino enthusiasts will be alarmed

yes, I can confirm that

AI devs close to scraping bottom of data barrel

Re: Help

"if I'm trying to come up with a medication to conquer the heartbreak of psoriasis"

I cannot see how AI/LLM is supposed to help here.

I do, and the OP is right : when you know what problem you're trying to solve using "AI", then you can feed it relevant data only. For example, if you want to triage the millions/billions of galaxies that modern telescopes can see, into some relevant categories, your model won't need to know any Shakespeare novel. It's enough to feed it thousands of examples of galaxies with their classification, and it can handle the rest.

The problem with the all-purpose generative LLM AIs is that they pretend to answer every possible question, and thus need to be fed with every possible subject.

Taliban impose tele-ban and take Afghanistan offline

Are you sure ?

@AC : MAGA has forced abortion and women's rights on all Americans ?

Tile trackers are a stalker's dream, say Georgia Tech researchers

Re: News flash: Tracking device tracks things

they send a warning to any local devices they're traveling with that they are present and active

hold-on : if, for example, someone would put such a tracking device on my stuff, how would I know that I'm being tracked ? I understand that people using trackers can have some sort of anti-tracking software on their phone, but as someone who doesn't use any such services, with gps and Bluetooth disabled by default, how would I be informed of a hostile tracking device ? It's a genuine question

UK splurges £4.4M on drones, e-planes, and other flights of fancy

Re: Wait, what?

yes, unfortunately yes : as a hobby model aircraft builder and pilot, I can see the cumulative restrictions placed on our activities. Now, not only do we need an individual license (an insurance) but each small aircraft need to be administratively declared and have a GPS tracking chip on-board. While I understand that there can be dangerous situations with big multi-rotor drones, I also see that politicians are unable to make the difference between a 2m balsa glider and a 50cm carbon quadcopter. We're treated as terrorists for both

OpenAI says models are programmed to make stuff up instead of admitting ignorance

Re: Stating the obvious but pretending it's new information, and getting paid to do it.

If I understand correctly, there is a difference between making things up with 95% chances to get it right (like a historical date), and making things up with no statistics to back it up (like an anniversary). When the model detects that it has no statistics, it could inform about that

US tosses $134M pocket change at fusion pipe dream

you missed "hybrid " and "agile "

Re: Two options

Option 1 exists already, it's called "photons". But you forgot

Option 4 : invest in thorium molten salt reactors

DARPA’s Cylon raider autonomous fighter jet advances to next phase

Re: Thinning

Just in time for fusion reactors and flying cars

BAE Systems surfaces autonomous submarine for military use

lessons learned

What the Ukrainian war is showing is that a war is lost by a lack of fighters, not lack of weaponry. So this is close to useless in a real war scenario. It is useful to fill the pockets of the military contractors though

NASA bars Chinese citizens from its facilities, networks, even Zoom calls

Re: “Our mission is maintaining American dominance in space,”

yes, I too think that's the core of the problem

KDE Linux and FreeBSD hit alpha and – surprise – fan fave Pop_OS nearly at beta

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

the hardest part is usually installation - a disadvantage that Linix and the *BSDs have that Windows, Android, et al don't obviously have

have you really tried to install Android on a device ? Like booting it into the bootloader, flashing the image, lighting 13 black candles arranged on a pentacle and praying it will boot again ? When was the last time you installed a fresh new Windows, or even a fresh new MacOS, on an unformatted hard-drive ? The reality is that Linux is the easiest OS to install today, by far. Dunno for *BSD

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

Nice, thank-you, I'll tty that

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

The times when I installed a new distro weekly are loooong past. Now I'm looking for boring distros, hence MX-Linux (Debian-based and systemd-free : we shall see how the next v25 fares in that respect, as the KDE variant will ship with systemd. Whether I can install the SysV-init ISO with FluxBox and later install KDE on top of it remains to be seen. If not, then it's going to be Devuan or FreeBSD)

Re: It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

can we retire the "complain about systemd" trope ?

this is the first thing that I search for when looking at a distro. Actually, I'm more-and-more considering FreeBSD because of that

It's bold, it's innovative, and ...

... it uses systemd :-(

Absolutely fabless: Trump derails TSMC's China chip-building effort

Re: there is another option

Exactly my thoughts :

the 3nm and smaller process tech used in its Taiwanese fabs to produce chips for the likes of Apple, AMD, and Nvidia

if TSMC chooses China over USA, it would only hurt US companies

Europe Putin the blame on Russia after GPS jamming disrupts president’s plane

29 may 2005

The European Union’s Commissioner for Defence and Space

WOT ??? Why does this post even exist ? Does the EU have an army ? May I remind people that the French voted against the Treaty for a European Constitution on 29 may 2005 (and the Dutch also, 2 days later)

Unlike most of Musk's other ventures, Starship keeps it together for Flight Test 10

Re: OK, lets take it back to serious land

They are very, very, close to orbital velocity when they cut the engines

empty, without payload ... where will it be with 100t of stuff on board ? The whole aerodynamic and mechanical balance will be changed when it's loaded with 100t on top ! I could bet 2 beers that this rocket is never going to put 100t in orbit. NEVER. I actually doubt that it will ever put anything in orbit, not even a banana.

I don't know of any example of a rocket that has been flight-tested empty. Heck, even the first Falcon was loaded with Musk's own Tesla roadster to make for weight. Testing a huge rocket empty and then loading it and expecting to behave as it was tested empty is unprecedented. As are the Raptor engines, the stainless steel structure ... something stinks fishy here

Re: OK, lets take it back to serious land

Different rockets had different goals

No, all rockets have the same goal : put something in Earth's orbit. Which Starship has failed to ever do in 10 attempts. Not even a banana

Mysterious X-37B spaceplane flies again, this time carrying a quantum GPS alternative

Re: IMU !!!

I think they're using micro-gravity to estimate the precision of the device (to get rid of the 1g vertical component on Earth)

IMU !!!

atom interferometry can be used to measure position

no, it can be used to measure acceleration. Like in "6-axis inertial measurement unit" where the 6 axes are 3 for linear acceleration and 3 in rotation around the 3 main axes X-Y-Z. It is meant to replace GPS when GPS is spoofed. One cannot measure speed with interferometry as that is what Michelson wanted to measure (the displacement speed of Earth in the Ether). But through acceleration one can measure the displacement of atoms.

As for rotation, it's possible to measure the rotation directly and not only the rotational acceleration (the physics involved is more complex to explain though : today, it's measured by interferometry in a spool of glassfiber, and when the device rotates in the direction of the spooling then the distance to travel in the fiber is slightly longer and can be measured by interferometry, when it rotates in the opposite direction the distance to travel is shorter).

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Duce

the conclusion that governments have become mafia and bought the law

that's the definition of fascism. And yes, we're there. Look at what happened to the Too Big To Fail banks and their managers in 2008 : they got bailed out and then stayed in place.

NASA starts bolting together Artemis III rocket for 2027 Moon shot

Re: Plan for a delay

I bet that the Chinese will land on the Moon before the Americans

A Linux alternative? Debian/Hurd shows microkernel Unix dream is alive

Re: They Don't

unless there's a bug in this gargantuan monolithic kernel somewhere

Bug or backdoor. What are the chances that some binary blobs in the kernel contain NSA-supplied code ?

The plan for Linux after Torvalds has a kernel of truth: There isn’t one

We can see the cracks coming already : systemD, Rust in the kernel, user-space drivers ... once Linus is gone, who will decide if and how Rust should be part of the kernel ? Or how much the kernel should rely on systemD being there ?

News from a possible future: ‘Rampant jellyfish cause AI outage by taking datacenter offline'

Re: So, another point for Thorium Molten Salt reactors then?

I don't think that the "western world " has realised what breakthrough that new type of nuclear plant by China is going to be. They have a new energy horizon, similar to what the US had after the second world war.

Trump pushes EU into trade 'deal' that several EU leaders aren't happy about

Re: The good, the bad, and the butt ugly

The EU has just committed economic suicide

that happened a long time ago. Around 2008 with the Lisbon treaty

Re: Let's see what Putin's little b**ch Orban does

It's better to get it from a country that's not blowing things up in a country you're trying to aid

like the USA and Gaza ? Or you might explain how "we" are "aiding" Ukraine : our "aid" has resulted in that country being blown to pieces and having lost 10 millions of its population. Had "we" not tried to "aid" in any way, Ukraine and its population would be much better off. Even for the Asov neonazi brigade, who could continue parading with WaffenSS symbols undisturbed.

And that by ignoring that much of the LNG that Europe is buying is still Russian anyway, just repackaged by some intermediary.

'Impossible hill to climb': US clouds crush European competition on their home turf

codeberg

codeberg.org is way better than GitHub, hosting in Germany, run by a non-profit organisation on their own servers. What's not to like ?

Please, FOSS world, we need something like ChromeOS

Perfection

@Liam :

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away

I've always attributed that quote to Einstein, but St Ex is as good an author for that. Thank-you for correcting my mistake

Large Hadron Collider data hints at explanation for why everything exists

Re: Mostly

That project aims to keep the people's jobs. The people at CERN can't realistically say that they have seen it all, good-bye and thank-you for the fish ! They need to come up with something to search for, where else could they continue to work ?

Ukrainian hackers claim to have destroyed major Russian drone maker's entire network

Re: Well

I think that what you mean is that civilians talk about "strategy " while military talk about "logistics "