Posts by DoctorNine

Microsoft will kill Remote Desktop soon, insists you'll love replacement

No matter how many times you poke an Ochre Jelly, you aren't going to get much of an effect. We've all been trying to get past the thing, but very few individuals have figured out how to kick it out of our local dungeons.

Re: From cool school, back to old school, or closed school.

It's snappy. I like it.

Google's Chrome divorce still on the cards as Trump's DoJ plays hardball

I'm confused...

Which one is the bad one now? I would like to see less Googly infiltration into global mindshare, yes. But they are most certainly not the only monolith in the tech sphere which bears investigation and possible divestments. Further, if this is a generic issue, are we seeing any other monolith getting the same spanking, or are the feds only hot for California Chrome? Mightn't it be possible that there is a bit of the hanky-panky going on with who does, and who does not, get such tender discipline? Hmmm...?

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

American vet here as well. Your analysis is entirely specious. The best part was Russian 'almost limitless human resources' and 'China /North Korean cold currency'. Oh my.

Re: Hmm

I was going to write that whole list out myself, and you have so generously saved me the time. Thank you.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

Not a very bright boy...

There are simply so many ways to indirectly hork a system with a tiny, tiny forensic footprint, that one wonders at the sheer stupidity here described. He signed the thing like Picasso. What exactly did he think was going to happen? Did he fantasize that the investigators were going to be so impressed with the code, they would call him up to try to rehire him? What an ego on this guy.

iOS users left refreshing in vain as Microsoft Outlook woes drag on

Re: New new new Outlook?

..and it seems they are all very shouty about what users and administrators MUST DO, but none of the tribe have the 'listening' feature enabled...

Linux royalty backs adoption of Rust for kernel code, says its rise is inevitable

Let me get the popcorn

I feel approximately the same way about squabbles between Linux maintainers as I used to in my youth about Saturday morning TV wrestling. Very entertaining as a spectator sport, but not to be taken too seriously. First, regardless of the skill level of the various fellows dressing tights, the whole thing is referreed by a certain individual who weilds a mean rapier, and rather enjoys exhibiting his skill with it. And second, the outcome of the whole mess is going to be reasonably benign, because everyone has to keep working together for the next show. Those who get too emotional and rage quit, need to remind themselves about point one above. In my personal opinion of course.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Farking bastards...

They were only exercising simple self-preservation. If anything went wrong with the thing, you'd naturally try to contact HP, and being rightously bothered by the lack of any semblence of human reason on the support line, you'd be back to the shop with pitchforks and various garden implements to have your just revenge. Who can blame them?

After China's Salt Typhoon, the reconstruction starts now

My grandmother was correct

I've always been suspicious of free cookies and those who would try to use them for nefarius porpoises. My granny warned me off such enticements as a lad. And even worse, are the cookie and candy store owners, who don't care about what the ultimate result of their enterprise might be, as long as they are making coin. Onward in sales regardless, you know. Caveat emptor. Even if the poor lamb consuming said sweets has not a clue whats in the wrapper. At some point, we will need to decide what we are willing to eat, and what we will not. It's a matter of survival.

Encryption backdoor debate 'done and dusted,' former White House tech advisor says

Re: Madness

My observation, after so many years of empiric data collection, is that many times, those who go into lawyering do so, because their head is a little too soft for mathematics and science, but they still want to be able to piss on the plebes from an ivory tower someplace. And bless them, but they do. Copiously.

Thus evidencing the actual reason the Alphabet wanted them to begin with.

Re: CALEA doesn't need to be reformed...

Succinctly stated. Thank you.

SvarDOS: DR-DOS is reborn as an open source operating system

Re: They fucked up the web browser?

To be fair, having a rail all around the room to mount one or more devices could be quite convenient...

Million GPU clusters, gigawatts of power – the scale of AI defies logic

The rules for thee are not for me

The irony of this Musk guy, telling us we need to give up internal combustion engines and buy electric cars instead, now building a data center which uses enough natural gas generator to power a small African nation, is simply incomprehensible. Is no one capable of rational thought anymore? What the genuine heck? I am seriously tempted to give up on this 21st century entirely and converting to Amish principle.

Outlook is poor for those still on Windows Mail, Calendar, People apps by end of year

Business opportunity

After reading all the responses in the comment section, it seems dreadfully obvious that the real barrier to progress, is that there needs to be a corporate-friendly Linux client for email and calendar uses, that can be managed securely like the old Windows Outlook used to do. Whoever does this first, will break the log jam, and the river will run free. So please, friends and neighbors, make it so.

Beijing wants Chinese outfits to seek alternatives to US silicon

Re: China blocked exports of gallium, germanium, and antimony

There are many ways to get germanium and gallium besides the normal method of native sulfide deposits and as a byproduct of zinc mining. The large stores of flyash which the US has from old coal powerplants are probably useful as a source, once the price gets to appropriate levels. Antimony is found in lead. There are a bunch of sources for that in Oklahama, where there are huge supplies of old lead tailings from ammunition production during WW II.

AWS says AI could disrupt everything – and hopes it will do just that to Windows

So is a hernia. And after you get one, you can't ever lift heavy things again.

Cloudy with a chance of GPU bills: AI's energy appetite has CIOs sweating

Re: Another Alternative

Well that accounts nicely for how to put a limit on the cap-ex for machine upgrades, but still doesn't address the op-ex of the 'lectrical tax on them little buggers. It's not insignificant.

Google offered millions to ally itself with trade body fighting Microsoft

Christmas is coming soon...

Writing letters to Santa are we? How festive!

How US Dept of Justice's cure for Google could inflict collateral damage

Collateral damage?

I'm still waiting for that promised comeuppance to MS for it's monopolitical nastiness with IE. Never happened.

Monolithic transnationals in the business world are very slippery critters.

China has utterly pwned 'thousands and thousands' of devices at US telcos

NSA. Under Clapper. Same thing though, really.

Re: Easily pwned Cisco kit

I've been warning about this for literally over a decade. No one listened. Now I'm about to retire, suddenly people want to talk about it. I can't be arsed. Pfft!

Re: Hijacked elections too

I have a bottle of bubbly ready for the inevitable event...

M4 MacBook Pro shows Apple is still glued to the idea of unfixable laptops

Re: I still have no idea...

Who is modular and also high-quality? Framework. I bought my last Apple laptop in the 20 teens. The last three for my group were Framework laptops.

Microsoft reboots Windows Recall, but users wish they could forget

Re: When stuck in a hole

We've decided you need to give us more money. See this new toy? We are going to fix things so your old toys won't work unless you buy it. Now gimme.

Chinese ship casts shadow over Baltic subsea cable snipfest

As I was saying...

I think this is the likely culprit. Of course the best way to deal with sabotage is real-time sensor monitoring of the areas around cables. Or alternatively, just go with satellite nets instead of cables.

Europe glances Russia's way after Baltic Sea data cables severed

Re: ...Or it could be a fishing trawler

It's a fairly common strategy when a marginalized nationstate wants to disrupt the free world's economic activity, to have a 'fishing trawler' or 'containerized cargo ship' do the actual deed. The strategy is simple: Plausible deniability. "We most certainly DID NOT want that to happen. There are always accidents in commercial shipping!"

Microsoft starts boiling the Copilot frog: It's not a soup you want to drink at any price

On being mortal...

A friend down the street's mother, when I was a medium sized kid, wanted to know exactly why that band was called, "The Grateful Dead". At the time, I hadn't read Jerry Garcia's answer to the question. So I replied to her, that sometimes life was so excruciating, dying would be a mercy. This is not the correct answer. But ever since that day in the 1960's, I have suspected that my supposition might still be applicable in certain circumstances. This may be one of them.

Google Gemini tells grad student to 'please die' while helping with his homework

Re: Ironic

I suspect this AI was trained on surreptitious recordings of conversations I had with my parents while growing up.

Apple drops soldered storage for 2024 Mac Mini

Not as happy as I might be

Even if it were simply an SSD, and not just a daughterboard, the tendency for Apple hardware is to do a boot check to see if everything is sending the 'authorized' id for that component. I am pretty sure that there is no condition where the purchaser is going to be in a position to save money bypassing the Apple tax. It's designed that way for a reason.

When Windows Server 2025 is delivered like it's 1999, nobody gets to party

Not again

The stupid. It hurts. Make it stop, Great Coder in the Sky! I beseech you!

The US government wants developers to stop using C and C++

Re: Stop with the useless A better than B crap

Jeebus... Reading that gave me the same sort of sensation as those dreams of highschool where you're standing naked outside your locker, and you realize you didn't do your math homework.

Classic Outlook explodes when opening more than 60 emails

Some people just want to see the world burn.

Arecibo telescope might have failed because of weak sockets

If memory serves

I am almost certain that there was a German punk band named 'Electroplasticity' back in the day. Although I may just be misremembering pieces of Japanese electro-punk brutality. The zinc in my memory sockets has probably been oozing out over time. There's nothing for it. Wouldn't be surprised if it all comes crashing down soon.

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Fractional Gains

Considering that the efficiency improvement still allows (some) speculative code execution, this is pretty much as good as we could have expected. What pleases me the most, is that this sort of strategy may be more generally applied to a number of potential security bottlenecks. Also, the nimbleness with which Linux distros can code in unique solutions to these issues, makes it more and more valuable as time goes on. Once again, a carefully curated hive mind shows itself superior to proprietary authoritarianism. There is a general lesson here, methinks.

Nvidia CEO whines Europeans aren’t buying enough GPUs

Suspiciously familiar...

Maybe it's just me, but I have a distinct prejudice against coercion from fellows in black leather jackets trying to strong-arm me into buying their overpriced goods.

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

Re: They need to hire the Chair of Unwritten Runes

It's almost like there might be a famous programming aphorism we could apply here... regarding garbage, and how it flows...

Linus Torvalds affirms expulsion of Russian maintainers

Your observation was going to be my comment as well. This is exactly how I would expect a Finn to act. What really gives me a chuckle, are people who think that this somehow comes from the US, or that it is being directed by the North Americans. Finns are generally quite vocal about aggressive Russian behavior. They certainly don't need someone from another continent to remind them how to deal with Russians.

Viable fusion power in a decade? Tokamak Energy dares to dream

Re: Within a factor of two anyway

I think the concern is that using that energy for containment means that there is 715MW of energy lost to waste heat someplace. And that is quite a large source of ambient heat to deal with. Especially in urban areas.

If you're excited by that $1.5B Michigan nuke plant revival, bear in mind it's definitely a fixer-upper

Re: So what is the solution?

The safest solution would be deep well geothermal at scale. At least until fusion comes online. It easily could be done with national or international funding. While we were at it, we could also legally mandate provision of energy and its infrastructure to the state itself. By doing so we could eliminate taxes entirely, and run the government on the profits from energy production. The economic reasons for the desirability of such an arrangement include the inability of large corporations to avoid taxation, because they would effectively be taxed at exactly their rates of resource usage; also there would be an increase in economic activity / velocity of money supply as the parasitic drag from income taxes is removed from small businesses and consumers. As an old dude, I really hope my children and my children's children can escape the grasp of contemporary oligarchs, who are rapidly cobbling together a new feudalism. Good luck my friends.

Netflix on Mars? Yeah maybe, thanks to NASA's laser comms demo

Nice news

I'd be interested in the details of the lasers used in this accomplishment. I think the technology here is likely to pervade future computing, especially given the inevitability of pervasive near earth orbit networks. Thanks for the update, Mr. Speed.

NASA switches off Voyager 2 plasma instrument to stretch out juice

Re: As ever, seriously cool

There is an interstellar mission planned from Johns Hopkins in 2030 I think. You can look it up if you are interested.

Ancient US air traffic control systems won't get a tech refresh before 2030

Priorities

The US could have a whole new system and money left over, if it just limited the price of Ozempic to the same price as it is in Denmark.

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Re: Five year old PCs need replacing :o

The upgrade in compute power and thus electricity consumption in our Brave New AI World begs the question of how everyone is going to be running our powerful new AI computers, CryptoCoin generators, electric vehicles, and personal wearables, without melting the planet by simple waste heat. In a fairly large 5K - 10K member corporation, what is the electric and HVAC utility tax for moving up? What productivity gain is needed to get the actuaries to authorize it? Does anyone besides NVIDIA and Microsoft actually benefit from this? If not, why are we just going along with it? Can't we please just stop with the proprietary greed, and settle on a nice Linux standard instead, since everyone is already so tired of the shenanigans?

White House seizes 32 domains, issues criminal charges in massive election-meddling crackdown

Progress and Economic Growth

While in the past one might have expected such news to come out of San Francisco, Boston or New York, I was fascinated to discover that this Russian operation was headquartered in suburban Nashville. I think we may safely conclude that Nashville may have gone a bit too far in its efforts to recruit international investment.

White House thinks it's time to fix the insecure glue of the internet: Yup, BGP

Re: The tribalisation of the internet.

Speak for yourself. All my nuclei are trained in the latest martial arts.

Meta digs deep to strike geothermal power deal for its US datacenters

A new thing

Regardless of the cat videos, it will be good to develop the practical technologies involved in using deep geothermal for more electric grid base load. As it stands, too much of the world's base load is gas and coal. Fusion is still a smidge too far away for anyone to bet on it now. And only China is only starting to use thorium salt reactors (first one is being built in the Gobi this year) for base load. That leaves deep geothermal if we want to do something about this CO2 thing. So good on 'em for giving it a go.

Texas sues GM for selling driver data to analytics, insurance companies

Re: ... and a slap on the wrist settlement to follow.

Well historically, these kinds of lawsuits happen in East Texas, because someone is looking for a deep pocket to pick. In this case, GM. And politically, the conservative AG gets to wank over a notable Democrat supporter. There are House and Senate seats to consider. It would be more likely that the State of Texas gets the payday at the end of the game. But yes. No mere plebes are going to see any serious money. Maybe a buck and a half if you send in the right form to the AG.