Posts by chuckufarley

Majority of Axon's AI ethics board resigns over CEO's taser drones

Re: This isn't a solution...

Dear AC,

Sorry for the down vote but you have left out an important part of the equation: Teaching people to value the lives and futures of others as much of they value their own life and future. OK, some one flunked school. Does that mean that one of their children or grandchildren will not be the one the crack sustainable fusion? What about the children and grandchildren of their victims?

Some people think that without believing in God and Satan that they can't be good or evil. That is and always will be a failure of imagination on their part. It's the kind of failure that kept Humanity in the stone age for thousands of generations. Now that we are approaching a human population of ten billion (10,000,000,000) people it's the kind of failure we must actively avoid to survive.

Re: This isn't a solution...

Thank you for successfully channeling Joseph Goebbels. Now I suggest you seek immediate long term therapy.

This is not a joke. You have issues.

This isn't a solution...

...It's just another symptom of the American Problem. Let's not debate this. Let's solve the American Problem. Let's get our priorities straight and create a nation that doesn't reach for guns (or tasers) to solve social and political differences.

That's my 2 cents.

Clonezilla 3: Copy and clone disk images to your heart's content

I use Clonezilla...

...for monthly backups on my home LAN. I start a VM with the the live cd (no other storage) that uses the host's filesystem cache, select the Lite Server option once it's booted, and mount the NFS share on my file server. Then I reboot each of my computers one by one and boot them from the network using Clonezilla's iPXE and back up the partitions. No need to mess with USB drives at all.

Broadcom to buy VMware 'on Thursday for $60 billion'

Re: Another week another acquisition

If there will ever be a globally recognized and globally respected regulator, then yes. Until then, no.

Your product?

Broadcom thinks it is *their* product. You just gave them money you could have spent on food to use their product. Like I said before, they hate FLOSS. The proverbial truth is in the proverbial pudding.

Re: In my not so humble opinion...

Thanks for down the vote and not leaving a reply. If you can't leave a shallow, incoherent, and senseless argument then just down vote!

In my not so humble opinion...

...It's waste of money for Broadcom to buy a business that paywalls features added onto open source software. Broadcom hates FLOSS ecosystems unless it will cost them sales. Because of this I think it will only lead to increasing the stagnation rate of an open septic tank. Decades ago VMware lost the ability to stay ahead of the FLOSS innovation curve and they have been riding their momentum since. I have a hard time believing that they have another $61 Billion of momentum left.

Of course it's also possible next year a Big Mac will cost $1,000.

Repairability champ Framework's modular laptop gets a speed boost

Re: I'll Be!

I does look nice, but until I can get an AMD Ryzen and wired LAN it's a "dog and pony show" to me. I'm sure the company's heart is the right place but Intel still owes me for all the bridges they burned down. While wifi is good and can be fast I don't have infinite money to turn electricity into radio waves 24/7.

US won’t prosecute ‘good faith’ security researchers under CFAA

Re: Who cares about the US DOJ?

You mean like posting on IT forums hosted in the Western Hemisphere just to stir up trouble? Tell me, how much do you get paid for this? Does it increase the odds of humanity leaving our Pale Blue Dot or does it just put food in your belly while you watch friends and family starve?

Re: Who cares about the US DOJ?

I apologize for the down vote, but I have to say that this post is endemic of some attitudes within the US. Some folks think that local laws should "Trump" the needs of a global civilization.

Personally, I'd like to welcome you to the 20th Century. I'm sorry that you are a bit late.

Re: "That's breaking and entering"

In some US states, the home owner can shoot and kill you if you are in their house without prior permission. I am not saying that this right or wrong. I am just saying that this *is*.

Turing Pi 2 crowdfunding goal smashed within a day

I'm guessing that...

...Crysis isn't going to run unless some makes an ARM port. On the other hand it can have tons of DNS servers running on it because, you know, it's always DNS.

I wonder how long it will be until I find a youtube video of someone running a samba PDC and remote desktop cluster on one of these.

Alibaba Cloud gets more of Android working on RISC-V silicon

Maybe I am short sighted...

...But I think it's far from a panacea to the problems China faces in over coming it's wafer production problem or the problems we "western" nations have with our landfill economies.

Why not design an OS that can run on multiple generations of ARM tech and then buy devices by the tonne from the west?

Linux kernel patch from Google speeds up server shutdowns

Why even...

...let the kernel handle this stuff? Isn't this what systemd is for?

$5bn+ Big Tech mergers in cross-hairs of draft US laws

Re: This seems like a turn in the right direction...

Oh, there is a reply! My apologies!

I have to say that your optimism is heart warming but I feel it is misplaced. If you dig deeper into our history you will find that the oligarchs of the USA have been waiting a long time to re-emerge. They make a cicada look like text book case of ADHD.

This seems like a turn in the right direction...

...so it's a turn that we will not take. The USA is just as much of an Oligarchy as our recently rediscovered Arch Nemesis and time isn't on our side when it comes to correcting the problem. I hate to be a doomsayer but I see no path forward that doesn't involve a lot of financial and physical pain if things are going to get better before the end of this decade. If things don't improve before then it will be a very long row to hoe before the weeds stop choking our Democracy.

Meta sued for 'aiding and abetting' crypto scammers

I am Shocked...

...Shocked I tell you, that Zuck made money off of the pain of suffering of others.

Chatter around GPUs for RISC-V is growing

I don't need a new kind of GPU...

...I need an effective and inexpensive PCIe x16, 75 Watt (No external power connectors needed), 64-bit OpenCL processor capable of working on two or more jobs at time. Science needs it even more than I do.

Screw the Graphics processing. Let's build the giant distributed Climate Cruncher.

.NET Foundation admits it 'violated the trust of project maintainers'

Nat's own words here

https://www.theregister.com/2018/06/08/nat_friedman_github_ceo_elect_ama_session/

Do you want speed or security as expected? Spectre CPU defenses can cripple performance on Linux in tests

The Foundation of Computational Trust...

...Is defined by four words. They are: Security, Transparency, Stability, and Speed. Think of them as Mazlow's Hierarchy of Needs in a digital format. Without Speed there is no reason to uses computers instead of pen and paper. Without Stability there is no way to trust the Speed. Without Transparency there is no way to trust the Stability. Without Security there is no trust at all.

I have spent a very long time thinking about this and I do not post it lightly. Please do not respond lightly.

openSUSE leaps to 15.3 – now built with 'same binary packages' as SUSE Enterprise

Re: way back...

Maybe I have missed something. Maybe I was in a coma and it came and went. Was there really ever a time when Red Hat was the default Linux distro? Haven't there always been at least two very viable alternatives to Red Hat?

Debian, Slackware, Mandrake, Gentoo, SuSE all have long histories and have spawned enough forks to keep forking going.

My point here is that in FLOSS ecosystems the "defaults" are just variables defined by the perceptions of users and developers, and the occasional journalist.

After all, before Linux was my "default" if I wanted FLOSS Unix I went with *BSD. Anybody else have a different default?

Re: Or use debian

You installed a rolling release version meant for development and it fell over while trying to install updates?

I am shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

Just in case anyone else has missed the not-so-fine-print:

Tumbleweed is a rolling release and Leap is a stable release.

I have the USB stick from the DVD...

...and I'll put it to use later today on my home servers. I hope the "package parity" with SLE pays dividends for them.

Many years ago I had installed OpenSUSE in a VM and played around with it. I never really gave it serious consideration for home use because I didn't want to leave Debian and Ubuntu. However Debian because a chore and Ubuntu has left users with no choice but the Snap Store. So earlier this year I switched my servers to OpenSuse and I have to say I am more pleased with it than I thought I would be. Coming from a guy like me, that is high praise.

UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden starts national security probe into proposed Arm-Nvidia merger

I seem to recall...

...in the distant past, that once upon a time Nvidia was the underdog. In this epoch long since past 3DFX with the go to graphics card. At least until they published an open source driver that Nvidia used to steal their patented hardware acceleration technology. Then when 3DFX sued Nvidia for patent infringment, Nvidia committed a very hostile takeover of 3DFX in order to make the case disappear.

I don't blame anyone for not trusting Nvidia. Hell, the really truly paranoid side me thinks that they set up shell companies to buy their products as soon as they launch just to drive up the prices.

Won't somebody please think of the children!!! UK to mount fresh assault on end-to-end encryption in Facebook

It is clear to me...

...that many politicians are being targeted by misinformation campaigns spread by antisocial networking sites. You see, if users can't encrypt their data then they can't hide it from the antisocial networks. Also, if the politicians are trying to regulate encryption they are obviously too busy to regulate corporations and run-away-capitalist-oligarch makers.

Nominet chooses civil war over compromise by rejecting ex-BBC Trust chairman

It's a good thing that...

...The UK isn't in the middle of executing a Brexit plan that is doomed to fail while managing the fallout of a global pandemic. Other wise the government would have it's hands full and wouldn't intervene.

Oh wait...

If you can't log into Azure, Teams or Xbox Live right now: Microsoft cloud services in worldwide outage

25 years after...

...I decided the I would never again willfully deploy a Microsoft branded DNS server this stuff is still happening. Good job Microsoft! You are still such so influential that systemd's resolved is following in your footsteps!

It's one thing to reinvent the wheel but it takes a special kind of idiot to reinvent the cube and call it a wheel.

Microsoft promises end-to-end encrypted Teams calls for some, invites you to go passwordless with Azure AD

Replacing my passwords...

...With bio-metrics just means that the bad actors will need to learn how to spoof bio-metrics. How would this compare to enforcing the managed use of lengthy, randomized that are changed on a regular basis?

One huge benefit of using bio-metrics is that over time it limits the amount of data that needs to be processed in order to authenticate a user. Another is that no one (to my knowledge) has come up with a quick way to spoof bio-metrics...yet. However, our finger prints rarely change. The same is true for our faces. Once a bio-metric measurement has been cracked it should be considered insecure for the foreseeable future. In my opinion if passwords are long enough, random enough, changed often enough, and are securely hashed they will remain superior to bio-metric authentication, but perhaps inferior to using bio-metrics as 2FA with strong passwords.

Instead of trying to chase this Holy Grail I think Microsoft would be better off spending it's money learning how to apply the Shannon Limit to Dev Ops in order to reduce the number of bugs in released code to something close to zero. I think that Grail is more Holy than passwordless authentication..

So, bye-bye mighty nerd haven Fry’s, took Silicon to the Valley... and now you must die

Fry's Failed because...

...The three brothers that founded it came from a family of grocers used to buying at the lowest price and selling for anything higher. A case in point is the mysterious 395 MHz AMD K6-3. This was on sale for one weekend at Fry's Electronics in late 1999. They sold out in hours with a price of just under $60 and yet there were only two motherboards in the world that could support the FSB speeds and clock multipliers needed to equal 390 MHz. They were a faulty lot of AMD K6-3 400 MHz CPU's Fry's bought and sold as to customers that didn't know any better. No one knows how many people never returned to Fry's after their new computer's burnt up three months later.

If you always insist on maximizing profits you are also driving customers away. Always.

Federal Reserve falls over in massive hours-long tech outage, knocks down US inter-bank transfer system

This is just a friendly reminder...

...That it is often a Good Thing to keep a simple script called cya.sh that contains the following line:

hostname && whoami && pwd

I am not saying the lack of such a script has anything to do the outage detailed in this news article. This is just a friendly reminder.

Canonical turns to Google framework for new installer, but community asks why not have a Flutter on GTK?

It won't matter...

...What the community wants. That's what Ubuntu's recent history has taught me. A lot of us were opposed to Snap being the default package manager, but it's what we have. I am going to be off of Ubuntu soon. OpenSUSE is looking very attractive, as is Void.

Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community

Re: I love the way developers...

That's cute and all, but I think you should read a bit more before you type. While you are not typing, study what you read. Get to know us. Did you know that on El Reg you can read the entire post history of a person just by clicking on their user name here in the comments section?

If I didn't like their opinions I would let it slide as long it didn't have a real world impact on the things that I care about. Debian is dear to me and it pains me that the devs continue turning it ever tighter into a death spiral. As the world changes around them they seem intent to carry on fighting a battle that was won years ago. Some of them seem blind to the fact that real battles now and in the near future will be fought in hardware and the casualties triaged and treated in firmware.

In the late 1990's one could install an entirely usable Linux desktop in less than 256MB of disk space. AMD now ships a CPU with that much L3 cache. How much longer until the OS-on-a-chip becomes main stream?

Re: I love the way developers...

Well, if it's semantics you want...

Please do not confuse Convenience with Usability!

If it's Freedom you want...

Please don't tell me shipping crippleware in the guise of Free Software isn't a joke!

Am I confused about why Debian exists? No, I think I have really good grasp of that one. Just because I don't write a novella to justify it doesn't make it so. What I am confused about is how Debian will continue to exist because the world is an ever changing place and they seem stuck in the year 2005. They have good VM support, but running containers is a headache. I cannot for the life of me name a single Cloud Provider that runs Debian on bare metal.

Twenty-five years ago it was revolutionary to "apt-get install apache" and the Debian devs were at the forefront of innovation. Now, a human generation later, they are proud of their crippleware! We are more than 20% on the way through the 21st century. Any software that is not both easily usable and open sourced by this point in time is either an evolutionary dead end or a niche product. Anyone wanna call the Vegas odds makers about Debian's future?

Re: Isn’t that what Debian-based distros like Ubuntu are for?

Ubuntu is not been based on Debian. They out grew it years ago. They may still have programs apt-get but they use their own code base now

Re: I love the way developers...

"No, the entire point is what is intended by..."

In all that follows the ... you did not make single point that countered my statement that software allows you to use your computer. I don't care what kind of program you are righting or which OS you are running it on. Software makes programmable hardware usable. Otherwise all computers would be limited to the instructions that could fit on the chips. It doesn't matter a user with ever directly access the system or not.

Now you are right to say that the Debian devs are not forcing me to use their software. In fact I would go so far so argue that their degree Zealotry is forcing a lot of Infidels like my self away from Debian because we, in our Unholy Filth, wish to actually use our hardware in ways close to the manner intended by the hardware manufacturers.

As unnatural as it may seem to you, not everyone in the world wants to boot to a command line after a fresh install. Nor do most user wish to have a computer that doesn't connect to the internet.

I am not trying to say that Debian doesn't have a place in the Linux ecosystem. I am just saying that every year that place is going to get smaller and smaller until things change because if you have to be a developer to use it then only developers will use it. That makes a good distro to base your distro on, but a lousy distro to use, even as a server. That will not last though because Debian isn't the only distro

with good devs.

OpenSuse, Fedora, Void, Funtoo, and even Gentoo make usability a higher priority than Debian does. And all them typically have much newer packages in their repositories. Think about that for a while and ask yourself where Debian will be 10 or twenty years from now.

Re: I love the way developers...

You say that shipping crippleware in the name of Free Software is not hypocrisy.

I love the way developers...

...get all high and mighty about the principles behind shoving their vision of what Free Software means down our throats. Anyone thinking that the old "Let them Eat Ubuntu" argument holds water hasn't thought it through. Some of these devs are unintentionally becoming worse then Gates or Ballmer because while Windows couldn't work well, Linux can work very well indeed. That's the entire point of any software: To allow you to use your computer. Putting any other so called "Principles" above that seems a very base form of hypocrisy to me. You know those firmware blobs get updates, right? And you know those updates fix bugs and security issues, right? So if the hardware manufacturers wish to protect their IP by hiding behind a binary driver blob I say let them as long the system stays stable and secure.

If the devs don't want to use it that it up to them but they shouldn't expect the average person to feel that way or make them jump through hoops because the entire point of any software is to allow you to use your computer. Usability is the ultimate freedom. Free Software is an empty slogan without usability.

Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite's ejection from Play Store

Give unto Alphabet what is Alphabet's...

...and add unto that what ever else Alphabet can grab. Yes, it's an abuse of power and should be fought. No, I don't think Epic has much of a chance by themselves. They need to team up other small players to stand a snowball's chance.

On a side note, I don't really understand why they put all of their eggs in the App Store baskets. They have a popular game that will run on a wide variety of operating systems (except Linux and *BSD) and could make money by releasing it through Steam or GoG or the Humble Store, etc. Maybe they feel they can make more from litigation than from widening their audience.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Never /dev/null...

...because that device file is actually vital to functionality of your system.

While I can see the Sisyphean Justice an every minute cron job something like: "cat Trump >> /dev/null && cp /dev/null /dev/null" I could not in good conscience run such commands on a server, even if I didn't like the owners because they were evil bastards.

Instead I would recommend something like setting /tmp to be cleared on reboot and then run

# mv Trump /tmp/not_tmp_enough

# sync

# rm -rf /tmp/not_tmp_enough

# sync

# fstrim -a -v

# btrfs scrub start /tmp

# shutdown -r now

I would only do this if there were no way to replace the server. Even then I would never trust it again.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: What frightens me most...

Ever join an FPS pub server and organize a group of strangers into a cohesive fighting force in less than ten minutes?

Sounding like you are right in important. Getting results is paramount.

Re: Not Unexpected

You are not being cynical enough, my friend. No conspiracy that large could exist because of the secret.

"Two men can keep a secret if one of them is dead."

People can and will and do talk. If the election was really stolen from Trump we would know about by now. It takes less than 6 seconds for email to travel halfway around the planet. If the proof were out there it surely didn't land in everyone's Spam Folder.

When in doubt use Occam's Razor. One of these scenarios is more likely to be true than the other:

A.) A national election was rigged through a broadly backed Conspiracy that crossed Local, State, and Federal jurisdictions and therefore required the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. And of all of those people not a single one has come forward, been caught in a lie, or made any other form of mistake important enough to give up the game.

B.) When faced with an insurmountable challenge to their world view thousands of US citizens have chosen to (once again) prove that Joseph Goebbels was correct when he said: "People would rather believe an unconvincing lie than an inconvenient truth."

So, ask yourself "Am I a Philosopher (Lover of Wisdom) or am I an Ostrich with it's head in the sand?" It is hard, hard thing to do. Yet it must be done if you really wish to carry on one way or the other. Other wise you are not carrying. You are being carried.

What frightens me most...

...Isn't what has happened today. It's what could happen later if other delusional persons should see this as their "Ruby Ridge Moment." Timothy McVeigh kill 168 people by himself. What could thousands do if they worked together?

Re: I'm surprised

" I'm surprised that anyone has downvoted any of the above comments. "

There are Cowards, there are Damned Cowards, and then there are Trump Fanatics. This is why I think anyone down voting a post on El Reg should be forced to leave a reply or at least named publicly.

Re: Kaiser Chiefs redux?

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/1346934098384793606?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

If only our ponies hadn't bolted. I wonder if Mitch McConnell is wishing he could call a redo for 2019...

Buggy behavior bites .NET SqlClient for unlucky Linux users

This is most likely nonsense so stop...

...Reading now.

.NET is meant to be a replacement for Java which Sun Microsystems meant to be the ultimate middleware platform. This means that Java inherited (and thus .NET) the age old "lost in translation" problem. Has anyone coined a Law about this that I could quote? Not to my knowledge so I'll get on with it...

You cannot optimize middleware for a given OS without causing performance problems and/or security issues on the other OS(s) you are running because, well, they are different. Apples are not Pi's, Windows are not Sun Rooms, GNU is Not UNIX, AMD is not Intel, Sparc is not ARM, etc.

My best guess is that someone somewhere has added optimizations to the .NET/mono code for their given platform and this is what is coming back to byte other users of the middleware. I can understand why they did it. Middleware sucks and they went to school and got a degree in programming and all they were taught was how to write apps in middleware. They were even told that this was good thing. So what harm can come from making a good thing better if the downside only affects people who are using super computers with 1024+ threads?

That kind of usage must be waaaayyy down the line. Like, 2030 at least. We can fix it before then. If we don't get laid off...

So yeah, code review FTW.

Chuck Yeager, sound barrier pioneer pilot, dies at 97

According to his autobigraphy...

...Chuck Yeager's great success as pilot was due in large part to his exceptional eye sight. As a squadron leader in WWII Yeager would be heading south across the Channel and spot the German aircraft, ID their makes and models, and have targets assigned to his squadron members a full minute before anyone else could see them. This is while flying at 300+ MPH toward the enemy and them moving at a similar speed toward him.

They are called The Greatest Generation for many reasons.

Windows on Wheels is back, though the truck has come to a standstill, much like the OS

Maybe the drivers...

...just wanted their own Stop Sign.

OpenZFS v2.0.0 targets Linux and FreeBSD – shame about the Oracle licensing worries

Re: "acting like Sock Puppet"

I will not even down vote you for that.

You can deny reality all you want to. However, the historical evidence is there to support an extreme amount of caution in this case. Until there is a body of historical evidence to the contrary, that is to say showing that Oracle and Larry Ellison have both changed their ways, I will not change my opinion.

Calling myself and others Zealots is easy to do without knowing us, but since this is the internet all you have to do is click my name to read my post history. Which you didn't do because you don't care one way or the the other about this matter. You just care about what you are paid to post. Just like any good Sock Puppet account holder.

So you and the rest of the Sock Puppet Army can:

Kiss

My

Ass.

Re: "acting within the rights granted"

Even as a private citizen I don't use ZFS with Linux because of the licensing conundrum. I can't recommend a business do it. If ZFS ever makes it into the main-line kernel then the weight of the Linux Foundation will be behind it.

Remember, is Oracle we are talking about. They ship their code to customers with features enabled they never paid for and then go back and sue them after they compile it.