* Posts by imanidiot

4690 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2012

Judge says US Treasury ‘more vulnerable to hacking’ since Trump let the DOGE out

imanidiot Silver badge
Facepalm

"Over the weekend, the home page of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CBFP) started to produce a 404: Page Not Found error - the seeming result of a reported decision to shut down the agency for at least a week. The Bureau’s activities include advice on how to avoid phishing and identity theft."

Can't have a federal agency that provably protects consumers against the maliciousness and uncaringness of banks, credit card companies, pay-day loan scum and other financial "institutions" now can we? The poor must be exploited without any pesky, (rich people) money wasting bureaucracy to protect them!

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: My take on this...

The problem with "allowing you to try a different distro every day until you find one that fits your lifestyle/way of working" is the very reason I have NOT moved to Linux. I have crap to do, and not enough time and patience to figure out how to do this in "yet another Linux distro" several times over before I might find one that does what I need. When I have time to turn my on my PC to do something, it is to do that something. Is this a catch-22, most definitely, but it's the reality I have to deal with and sticking to Win10 is currently the best worst option I have.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Why change?

The fact that something like Tiny11 can exist that takes an over 20GB install file/image down to 3.54 GB should be indication enough that Win11 is bloated beyond any reasonable measure. There's so much cruft that is just not required it's frankly nearly unbelievable.

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

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Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

The problem is that a lot of "kids these days" aren't even using desktop PCs anymore. Their world is centered around phones and tablets. PCs are those old things old people who don't understand the current world anymore use to do boring old people stuff. Their choice of OS is Android or iOS

Edit: Yes, for a small sub set, PCs are for gaming. And only gaming. And most games run best on Windows. So that's what they want/use and we're back to the chicken and egg of "most games are only supported on windows because that's what most gamers use, and most gamers use windows because that's what all the games they want to play needs"

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

There comes a point (very very fast) where, if you're trying to use something like that for official business reasons, you have to just give up and do it the way the software "developer" wants/expects it done. Because sure you might be able to get it working for now on unsupported hardware and OS, but sooner rather than later the developer will change something expecting all clients to be running Windows and break your setup. Adn then you can't get done whatever needs to be getting done. Can you afford that? Can you afford to keep clients/patients waiting for you to sort this crap out? If not, save yourself the hassle and run on the expected hardware and OS.

'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

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Can we just STOP with the "Abandoned" already?

Even if it's in quotes, it just keeps getting repeated by media so often as if it's serious that it is getting very very very annoying. Those astronauts are not abandoned or 'abandoned'. NASA made the operational decision based on available capacity to extend the crews stay on the ISS. If they really had to they could have brought them down on Crew 8 easily enough. If it was really neccesary, there could have been another dragon capsule to get them back long before now. Both of them knew there was a possibility they might have to stay longer if Starliner had issues (again). Both of them knew there was a high probability of that happening. This is a (admittedly bit of an extreme) case of a support engineering having to stay longer at a customer site to solve a problem.

Arrr! Can a sailor's marlinspike fix a busted backplane?

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Re: Captain Horatio Pugwash?

I am near positive it would be a reference to Nelson, or perhaps his fictional literature counterpart Hornblower.

Court rules FISA Section 702 surveillance of US resident was unconstitutional

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""I can assure the American people, the Chinese government is not tying its hands behind its back. It's going the other direction, and we need to do the same."

This has very high stink of "but he started it" levels of argument here. Just because China wants to drag net it's own citizens doesn't mean the US should. And if it wants to drag-net foreigners and use some of that data gainst a US national, is it REALLY too much to ask for them to get a warrant based on "hey, we found legal evidence this foreigner is communicating with a US national, can we please gather more evidence to determine who it is?"

"just do whatever you want" is not a level of freedom we should want to give security agencies.

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

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Re: I'm confused!

First you need them to sign off on the audit. You could fake their signature, hack the required audit portals, forge and upload the needed documents, etc. But that just sounds like work and it's nearly pub-o-clock. Best get the auditor to do it "of his own free will", just before he decides to say goodbye to this crew world with a long step off the roof.

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

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Boffin

Re: Tokamaks do it in a chamber, often doughnut-shaped

My understanding (though I'm very very far from that particular field of engineering) is that while the stellarator has some advantages over a Tokamak in terms of field confinement it trades those advantages in against other disadvantages in plasma control. It doesn't seem to - on balance - be better or worse than a Tokamak. I'm most interested to see what will come from ITER once it's finally come online.

imanidiot Silver badge

Tokamaks do it in a chamber, often doughnut-shaped

The very definition of a Tokamak is that it uses an axially symmetrical torus, so not only is it "often' doughnut-shaped, it's ALWAYS doughnut-shaped. There's a spherical variant, but that's always specified with the "Spherical" qualifier. But since it also has a center pole, you could argue it's still a donut shaped chamber, just one with a very thin hole

Donald Trump proposes US govt acquire half of TikTok, which thanks him and restores service

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Re: This is ...

Honestly, with the collapse in value of X (brought on entirely by Musk) and a struggling Tesla I doubt that he actually can. He's likely leveraged up the wazoo and I doubt he's currently going to find much external capital with friendly enough terms that he'll want to risk it.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: This is ...

He hasn't actually proposed anything. He's blustered a lot about how he's going to, but he's never actually said anything concrete. And his lips were moving, which is a sure sign a politician is lying.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

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Musk keeps going on and on about mars and wrinkling his nose at going to the moon which is an entirely stupid take imho. Going to the moon is an "easy" and "nearby" thing to do to develop the technologies needed, do fast iteration and get stuff solved. Going to Mars is going to be extremely difficult and once we get there we'll once and for all destroy the only chance we'll ever have to definitively answer the question of "is there life on mars" because once one of us filthy monkeys puts a foot down, we'll have contaminated the surface with earth microbes which we know can survive in mars conditions and spread very far and wide. From that point on, we'll never be able to be 100% certain if we find earth like micro-organisms whether they were martian origin or earth origin contaminants. We should be sending far more rovers ala Curiosity and Perseverance which we can properly clean and disinfect and do far more useful science RIGHT NOW, instead of sinking billions into Musks starship to get it to go to Mars. We're not at a stage were we should be doing that.

Improved Windows Search arrives... but only for Copilot+ PCs

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Who's asking for this?

Does anyone at Microsoft actually have ANY clue what their actual users want out of Windows? How is this useful to anyone out of really weird specific edge cases that never happen for most users?

Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Not "Fixing", Exactly

I would put purposefully crashing a system and causing data loss down as entirely unethical. Don't do that. If it happens to occur naturally it's a good lesson, but it's not one you should be causing on purpose. Because if anyone with an iota of a clue ever finds out you'll likely receive marching orders.

Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products

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Re: Honesty - a breath of fresh air.

They're just slowly preparing for when inevitably they're going to have to admit that AIs don't work all that well and that they sunk billions into a useless development that they'll never recover

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

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Boffin

I doubt there was going to be any chance of the ship surviving to belly flop. For one it would have still been over 3/4 of the way full with oxygen and methane (so over 2500 tons of the stuff) so compared to normal re-entry it would have come down like 3000 tons of bricks instead of comparatively floating like a feather. Add to that when engines where shutting down, the ship seems to have lost the center engines first. That is important because the outer vacuum engines don't gimbal to provide control, only the center 3 sea-level raptor engines have any gimbal authority. It's very likely that with that much propellant the outer vacuum engines are not thrusting through the center of mass of the vehicle, meaning that if control authority on the gimballing engines is lost because they are no longer firing, having just one vacuum engine operational is VERY quickly going to have the ship do a "cobra maneuvre" and it's simply not made to survive that. Even if the FTS didn't fire, I doubt it would have been in 1 piece.

Brits must prove their age on adult sites by July, says watchdog

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Facepalm

Why are we even letting children on the internet?

Let's just ban anyone under 18 from the internet. That'll be far more effective.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Age verification

Children can't have a SIM (with data) contract either, so it's STILL the responsibility of the person providing them that access.

DJI loosens flight restrictions, decides to trust operators to follow FAA rules

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Large soaring birds seem to have the same thermalling etiquette that us monkeys do in our flying contraptions. Join opposite or equally divided, turn in the same direction, keep a good lookout, don't fly through a gaggle of thermalling birds/aircraft. Best experience I've had was 5 storks and what looked like a cormorant in a +3 m/s thermal starting at a few hundred meters all the way up to well over 2000 meters altitude. At my local we regularly share lift with buzzards, falcons and kestrels.

imanidiot Silver badge

Idiots will be idiots, but removing geo-fencing restrictions imho is just a bad idea. Because it removes even more restrictions on idiots to allow them to do idiot things. As a (glider/sailplane)pilot, I find the unfettered growth of drones and their use a very worrying development. My interactions with their operators have always been... less than favourable shall we say on their knowledge about airspace and see and avoid rules. They always seem to assume that we should just see their tiny spec of a drone and fly around it when usually they shouldn't even be in my airspace.

Boeing going backwards as production’s slowing and woes keep flowing

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Re: "Main Plants", "French"

And then people from any of those site have to go to the main offices in Toulouse for testing, design meetings, etc and the french (even if they are in the minority) will try to insist on talking french. English is better on the corporate level because the majority of engineers in this day and age have a decent grasp of English and more importantly engineering English. Yet the French want to talk french, which basically only they speak decently.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: About Airbus / Not "French"

"Airbus is one of the few European projects which actually work nicely"

For some definitions of "work nicely" yes. (Let's just say that while english is supposed to be the main language in the consortium there's an awful amount of French getting spoken at the main Airbus airliner plants)

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Boing

The MD-88s in service all have JT8D-200s installed (larger diameter) and likely have some form of hush kit. The 727 used JT8D-1 through -17 engines (smaller diameter, the -200 could not be installed in the No2/centerline position) was a Class 2 noise aircraft and needed hush-kits and other modifications to be quiet enough to meet class-3 noise limits. Many were updated but it was only of limited success and fuel burn was definitely an issue. Which is why versions of the MD-88 are still flying but the 727 went out of service in 2015 iirc.

Oh, Deere! FTC sues tractor maker, alleging decades of monopolized repairs

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: This story is just about the US scene: wot abaht foreign customers?

It's basically the same in Europe, but I don't think Deere is nearly as widely used in this part of the world. I think most of the farm equipment I see around here nowadays is German (Fendt, Claass, etc)

imanidiot Silver badge

" ignores the company’s long-standing commitment to customer self-repair and the consistent progress and innovation we have made over time,"

What Deere of course doesn't want to say is that this commitment to customer self-repair is a commitment to make it impossible. And that the consistent progress and innovation they have made over time is entirely towards that goal.

Celebrating when EVs went to the Moon with a Lego Lunar Roving Vehicle build

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: "We asked Lego why it did not create a custom part for the dish"

On the one hand I too hate the stickers, on the other hand it could be argued that having custom printed bricks for sets is potentially even worse than having custom bricks, since it would mean that printed bricks are super specific to that one specific set (and nothing else basically).Most of the time, I just leave the stickers off the sets I build and store them in the box. A lot of the time, sets look fine without them.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: "We asked Lego why it did not create a custom part for the dish"

I don't see the problem in being an old curmudgeon.

It's kind of pointless on the topic of "custom Lego pieces though imho, because there's still plenty of fan models that get use out of those "custom, one purpose" pieces in all sorts of other applications. Weird pieces have been around for a very long time and re-purposing those pieces in other sets has too. I don't always agree with the choice of using more special bricks but a lot of the time if they do it's because doing it any other way would have required complicated specialty building techniques that just don't fit the target demographic of the set. It's all fine and dandy to make something difficult to build in the sets targeted at adults, but it's annoying if kids aged 6 need to find a parent to finish a step in the instructions.

Pornhub lockdown and fact-free Zuckbots – welcome to 2025

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: It's an easy go to

None of that disqualifies him from looking at porn though. And apparently, given his actual conviction record, the US is fine with those things (But god forbid someone see a sliver of a nipple)

imanidiot Silver badge
Pirate

Re: Three competing wants.

There is no such thing as "banning porn online". Porn will happen. No matter the laws. Legally or illegally people are going to see genitalia. It's why the internet was born

imanidiot Silver badge
Meh

Re: I miss the old Register

Take off your rose tinted glasses, find a mirror and do some introspection. The tone and topics of the Reg have changed, but not nearly by the extend you seem to think. Are you sure it's not YOU who has become a bitter old Anonymous Coward?

imanidiot Silver badge
Trollface

Re: It's an easy go to

By sending them a (badly) photoshopped together and slightly blurry photo of "Donald J. Trump's" passport?

Foundation model for tabular data slashes training from hours to seconds

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Re: F NO NO NO

At least they're calling it by it's proper name (machine learning) instead of the bullshit marketing term that is all the rage at the moment

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: F NO NO NO

They CAN be random number generators. Spreadsheets have their place but it's usually not the "final solution and oracle of truth" position they often end up in.

Europe hopes Trump trumps Biden's plan for US to play AI gatekeeper

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Re: Let's go with China...

With China, you can be damn sure any policy is going to benefit China. With Trump, you can be damn sure the policy will benefit... someone. Probably. Or maybe. And no-one will be sure who that someone is.

imanidiot Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Funny

The EU president IS largely irrelevant. There's basically nothing that can't be done if she's not around. While Biden is SAID to be largely irrelevant, he does actually hold certain functions that (at least nominally) require his sign off. If von der Leyen was theoretically fatally hit by a bus tomorrow, the EU would continue functioning as if nothing happened until a replacement could be isntalled. On top of that, culturally, stuff like medical issues just isn't a topic that gets this sort of large attention this side of the pond.

And it's not as if a US congres member didn't just disappear and turn up in a dementia ward after six months... https://nypost.com/2024/12/22/us-news/missing-texas-rep-kay-granger-found-in-memory-care-unit-report/

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: No limit for the Netherlands but for EU?

Even reselling within the EU of "US origin technology" is deemed an export under US rules, which means the US could enact sanctions against the company or country doing so.

Microsoft, PC makers cut prices of Copilot+ gear in Europe, analyst stats confirm

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Cut price on Co-Pilot?

They couldn't pay me enough to put up with something like that as is. I might accept it if it was free and I was unconstrained to completely wipe it and install my OS of choice.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: .. the prospect of tariffs on technology made in China

"Trump does not understand how tariffs and taxes work" Part 6321.

I for one can't wait for this to explode in his face as anyone with a modicum of understanding of world economics and trade can predict it will.

Is it really the plan to take over Greenland and the Panama Canal? It's been a weird week

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: speech is apparently free

"because Ukraine were encouraged into declaring allegiance to EU" And it's entirely a matter of perspective (and truth) who was doing the encouraging.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: speech is apparently free

Why does the EU have to side with either? We can hate both the US AND Putin. There is no way the EU is going to align with Russia/Putin. As for economically failing... Let's just ignore that the last few economic crises we've had have ALWAYS been the fault of the US. I also see no reason why it would be delusional to think the UK might not side with the US. No matter the situation with brexit the vast majority of it's trade is still happening with the EU. Even militarily it's currently more aligned with EU forces than US doctrine.

Blue Origin gives up on New Glenn lift-off, 2 hours into launch window

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Launch Abort Mandatory

Especially with crew on the lower deck, a capsule ejection system just wasn't feasible on STS, it would have involved basically ejecting the entire pressurized cockpit/nose section. Structurally and weight wise that was never going to happen. The ejection seats were only for the 2 crew in the pilot seats, and were only "hot" on STS-1 through 4. They were disabled by STS-5 and eventually removed. The seats only worked up to 80k feet after which the SRB plumes expanded to a size that the ejecting pilots would pass straight through the SRB exhaust. At nearly the same time dynamic pressure would also exceed face-plate limits, meaning they'd be screwed either way. There was a radio call "negative seats" to indicate this point. On return, the seats were only useable below a certain speed (iirc somewhere around mach 2.5) meaning that on re-entry the seats were also not useable for the majority of the ride until way down in the atmosphere (well beyond the point an out of control shuttle would break up).

Europe coughs up €400 to punter after breaking its own GDPR data protection rules

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With stories like that first one it should become ever more obvious to anyone that blocking ads as much as possible should be the default. Get an ad-blocker, script blocker and canvas blocker or run a browser with those integrated.

Axiom Space shuffles space station assembly sequence – to get it standalone sooner

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: European space station

The joke about stuff getting built by the lowest bidder has been around since the original Mercury 7 and is not remotely new

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/27/lowest-bidder/

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Headmaster

Re: Relook at

I would have gone with reevaluate, but either would be a perfectly cromulent word to use in such a situation.

Ingenuity helicopter's flying days cut short by featureless Martian terrain

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: CFIT

Better camera resolution would probably have avoided this. The downward looking cameras aren't very high res (on purpose, higher resolution also means higher computational load to deal with that massive increase in data) which likely contributed to not being able to track any ground features.

Long term something like a Mars LORA system might be a way to handle it, but we're far from being able to deploy something like that currently. Also keep in mind that Ingenuity was a research project intended to make no more than a single handful of flights over a few sols. It was definitely not expected to last for 72 flights.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Have one, Ingenuity! —>

Ginnies radio isn't powerful enough to reach earth. Currently it still has line of sight with Perseverance and Percy is relaying this communication to earth (sometimes via MRO) but once that moves out of range it's unlikely we'll ever get a signal from the little helicopter that could again.

US airspace closures, lack of answers deepen East Coast drone mystery

imanidiot Silver badge

I have a very hard time believing the stories about SUV sized "drones". Something that size would weight several hundred kilograms at least and require ground handling equipment at the site of launch and landing. It would also be about as stealthy as an aluminium blimp and be easily visible on primary radar.

The one photo I can find of something that MAYBE depicts something like that is either one of the idiotic manned "air taxi"/"personal multirotor" type craft or just a much smaller drone (but closer by). The talk about these giant drones being ultra silent makes me thing they're either just small drones not that far away or maybe indeed large drones but very far away (multi-rotor sound is more of a white-noise type sound and doesn't carry far. It easily get's drowned out by nearby traffic noise and stuff like wind blowing through trees).

My suspicion is just stupid people flying normal drones for stupid reasons. (That includes startups doing things like drone transport/delivery and mapping that can be done far easier at scale with normal aircraft)

Android beefs up Bluetooth tag stalker protections

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I'm a luddite

Not broadcasting your presence by scanning for wifi networks or broadcasting a bluetooth connection strongly lessens the ability for "bad guys" to track you. EMCON is a thing at all levels. The true bad guys will use things like IMSI catchers, fake cell networks and persistent targeted malware, but if you're threat assesment is at that sort of level, you probably shouldn't be carrying a (switched on) cell phone. Switching off bluetooth and wifi isn't about foiling nation-state level security threats, it's about stopping marketing execs and data brokers.