Posts by Wormy

Brit techie shows us life in Ukraine amid Russian invasion

Many of us in the US feel the same about our dear leader.

None of his party have had the balls to kick him out, the next in line quite literally doesn't have the balls for the job (and giggles like a schoolgirl whenever she gets nervous, which is apparently a lot, and at all the most inappropriate times). The opposition party buffoon has the balls but not the brains, and also hasn't been swiftly kicked out of politics as he should have been.

We need a third party that runs on a platform more significant than "legalize weed."

'Hundreds of computers' in Ukraine hit with wiper malware as conflict continues

Re: "Of course you realize, this means war"

I'll do you two better.

1) Germany

2) Japan

3) Italy

Nokia Bell Labs gets funding to cool down data centres

Only $2M?

This is an interesting problem, and one that would be nice to solve. I have to wonder, why is an organization the size of DoE only throwing $2M at it? That's less than the cost of one rack full of high-spec servers, and the savings to the USG alone could easily be tens of millions of dollars (or more) annually if they get it right.

It seems like a $2M investment is meant to show they're doing something, rather than being meant to actually do something.

Toshiba reveals 30TB disk drive to arrive by 2024

Re: far too big

I assume you meant 30TB SSD. They're available, but bloody expensive, and generally only in U.2 form factor that you'd be hard-pressed to fit in a modern laptop. Desktop you should be fine with a little extra hardware, though (I think I've seen carrier cards that will take a U.2 and plug into a PCIe slot).

Amazon Glacier, if you don't mind your backups being hosted on someone else's hardware. Or someone else's competing infrastructure (Backblaze, etc.).

Is that out of 32 purchased?

I once had 4 Seagate drives in a raid set in a home server... and 5 failures the first year. Their enterprise drives are somewhat better... I've traditionally seen about a 10% AFR with Seagate. HGST on the other hand has been mostly around probably 1-2% (now WD, as long as you buy the right line).

Yes, they had that one period under IBM where they were well-known for being the DeathStar drives, but that was a *LONG* time ago now. Seagate has reigned supreme as crappiest drive on the block for probably 2 decades at this point, with Toshiba somewhere between the two.

Cheaper is not always (or even usually) better.

FBI seizes $3.6bn in Bitcoin after New York 'tech couple' arrested over Bitfinex robbery

Re: "by decrypting a file saved to Lichtenstein’s cloud storage"

Probably double-ROT13 on an Excel file with a password.

Why would someone steal fake money from a system whose whole point appears to be to leave an immutable trail of tears^H^H^H^Hransactions?

And if one did, why would the very first step not be to figure out how to convert to tangible assets, followed by a nice quiet trip to the Grand Caymans or wherever people go these days, now that the Swiss have given up on strict banking privacy?

I imagine one could realize a few hundred $k of "foreign investment income" every year, declare it to the IRS and actually pay the taxes on their ill-gotten gains so they don't incur the wrath of that particular agency, and go on about their lives without drawing too much attention. Greedy people always make the stupidest mistakes though, it seems.

To err is human. To really tmux things up requires an engineer

Safety Poweroff Scripts...

Safety scripts are a wonderful thing here. Years ago when I played with computers for fun instead of for a living, I got tired of accidentally turning off the server (in my garage, with the cold concrete floor) when I was working on it from my laptop from my warm bedroom or office or couch. Of course, this being an ancient server, there was no BMC I could connect to to turn it back on.

So, I wrote a very small safety script named 'poweroff' and stuck it somewhere in the path with higher priority than the regular 'poweroff' command. It simply checked if it was being called locally or across an SSH session; if it was local, it called the regular 'poweroff' command and so was completely transparent. If it was called from a remote connection, it would pop up a confirmation message giving the name of the machine, and "Are you sure?" A quick 'Y' would proceed to shut down the machine, while anything else would bail out of the script without doing anything.

Saved me more than a few walks across a cold concrete floor, and IMO something similar ought to be an option on pretty much every OS out of the box.

Amazon stretches working life of its servers an extra year, for AWS and its own ops

Re: "servers have a useful life of five years"

CPU and architecture progress is anything but a crawl, if you've looked at the enterprise space lately. It was pretty much crawling until AMD came along and threw an EPYC party, blasted past Intel, and now Intel is madly scrambling to catch up.

Then along came servers with PCIe 4.0 (thanks, AMD), and now along come servers with PCIe 5.0 (thanks, Intel), and here comes the NVMe that can take advantage of it (thanks, NAND vendors!) and finally ease THAT horrible bottleneck. Then we have the new SSD form factors coming, which have been talked about for years but are finally making it into real mainstream products.

Your spinning disks may have a 10-yr life span (assuming you got HGST/WD drives, and not Seagate), but even there, every few years you can get a drive that's twice the size, while using the same or less power - not that people really use spinning rust in the datacenter much anymore.

For enterprise/datacenter SSDs the advances are even more notable - not that long ago, a 12TB SSD was exciting (except the only company that had one made it out of a bunch of eMMC glued together with silly putty, and the performance was terrible). Now we can get an off-the-shelf 30TB SSD from a couple different vendors, and the performance is actually good. In the near future, hopefully I can get a 60TB SSD from the same vendors, reducing my part count, cost, and overall power draw.

Getting rid of the servers that are 3-5 years old is not so much because they're "worn out" and non-functional, but because it doesn't make economic sense to keep running them when they're so far behind the things I can buy now. When I can wheel in one rack of hardware to replace and outperform 3, that's a win - less datacenter space to buy.

So, the limit is more about what makes sense from a performance/scale perspective, and not about the actual operable life of the hardware.

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: Marked up

Agreed, cost for qty. 1 with all the paperwork is always going to be ridiculously high, because it includes cost of design, tooling, multiple forms/certifications/signatures/testing, etc.

Per-unit cost decreases drastically once you manufacturer in volume, so if $contractor builds 1000 of these toilet seats perhaps their cost comes down to $100/ea (and if it's FAA or other TLA certified, that may be a bargain... I have an FAA-certified noise canceling headset for which I paid around $1300, even though it's likely not that much better than consumer stuff costing $300).

Final PCIe 6.0 specs unleashed: 64 GTps link speed incoming... with products to follow in 2023

I'd buy it today if it were available (for work). Constantly hitting up against the PCIe bottleneck, particularly on older PCIe 3.0 systems, but even to some extent on 4.0. With the limited number of lanes available to things like front-facing NVMe, 6.0 will be fantastically useful.

Logitech Signature M650: A mouse that will barely emit a squeak or a clickety-click

Re: Stop with the handedness!

I've been using a Microsoft Bluetrack "Wireless Mouse 5000" (bought as part of the "wireless desktop 3000" or now 3050) for somewhere around 12 years now as my all-day every-day mouse for work. It doesn't really work on glass (biggest difference between bluetrack and darkfield), but works on pretty much everything else. I generally get about a year out of a set of batteries (again, using it 8+ hours/day 5 days a week, on average, though ironically my battery light just came on as I write this), it's ambidextrous, and though it has some rubberized surfaces on the sides I've never had them go sticky or weird on me.

I've bought several of them due to having multiple places I wanted to use them (home, work, wife's computer, etc.), but I don't believe I've had one actually go bad.

Oh, and even though it's Microsoft hardware, it works just fine and dandy on Mac and Linux also... just in case anyone was wondering.

Intel updates mysterious 'software-defined silicon' code in the Linux kernel

Re: The plan is obvious

Hah... going to install it in a Dell server? The newest ones can be 'fused' to the OEM on install, so after once installing it in a Dell server, you will only EVER be able to install it in a Dell server. Put it in a SMC or HPE server and it will simply refuse to boot.

Intel and AMD both make a good product, and they both do some things that really piss me off.

Re: @AC - @Zippy´s Sausage Factory - The plan is obvious

It's not quite that simple... a lot of the lower-end chips are the higher-end chips that didn't make the cut due to manufacturing issues, and so had some of their cores disabled, or were down-clocked because they couldn't handle the higher frequencies in testing. This is called 'binning' where the CPUs are manufactured, and then sorted into 'bins' based on their capabilities.

So, Intel isn't going to only sell high-end CPUs that have to be unlocked, because they would have to just throw out a lot of their lower-end CPUs if that were the case, and they'd lose money.

More likely, this is for things like enabling VROC via software instead of requiring a hardware dongle. Hardware dongles suck, they take up space on the system board, some OEMs won't add the socket for them and simply won't enable the feature, etc. If Intel can unlock such features via signed licenses, it saves on hardware cost AND becomes much easier for both the OEMs and the customers (imagine having to open 500 servers to install VROC dongles, vs. applying a software license via API).

MySQL a 'pretty poor database' says departing Oracle engineer

Re: There is no reason not to choose Postgres

Even for people who are very IT-literate, there are some things Excel does better than any other commonly available software. One example is where you need both semi-pretty representation of data for human consumption, and a lot of tie-ins with data that isn't so human readable.

For relatively simple cases, I can do that in Excel in a few minutes, and send it to other people who generally can open and use it with no problem.

If I build it using a true database, I either have to have that database hosted somewhere, or make people install extra software. That's a HUGE impediment to rapid information sharing.

Excel also makes for a very convenient way to quickly mock up what you think you might want in a database, and pass it along to the devs to implement.

It's true, it's relatively terrible at a lot of things - it's slow, it's cumbersome, it's missing a lot of features that would make it much more useful. But, for a lot of things, it's still the quick/easy/dirty way to do something when you don't have time for development work.

USA signs internet freedom and no-hack pact it's ignored since 2018

Re: Bit by bit, the USA is returning to being a normal world citizen

AC - I do not think that word means what you think it means.

There is nothing anonymous on today's internet, only that which has not yet been unmasked.

Amazon aims to launch prototype broadband internet satellites by Q4 2022 – without Bezos' Blue Origin

Re: Is it actually worth it?

Nice thing is, Starlink benefits the poor nations at least as much as the rich, maybe more. In right nations, the majority of people already have high speed internet in some fashion. In poor nations (I'll use Haiti as an example) a 4Mbps fiber connection can cost something like $200USD/month from Natcom. Starlink means that a clinic (for example) can upgrade from 4Mbps to 100+ Mbps while halving their costs, and have sufficient bandwidth to video conference with medical facilities in the US about patients they're seeing. It means schools can have enough bandwidth that maybe they can teach computer classes.

There are a huge number of benefits from a system like Starlink to developing nations.

Latest Loongson chip is another step in China's long road to semiconductor freedom

Re: A Fork of What?

Well, CentOS is a fork of RHEL (well sort of... I know the CentOS/RHEL relationship is incestuous enough it probably shouldn't quite be called a true fork)... and Loongnix is a new fork of that hot mess.

Given its country of origin, shouldn't that be a spork (as in, Sino-Fork)?

Non-profit's IT manager accused of embezzling $400k by buying gear, services from his own fake companies

Re: Plea deals seem coercive

You're not wrong.

I got beat up by some cops, spent a night in jail, charged with "obstructing a law enforcement officer" and "resisting arrest," got to pay an attorney several thousand dollars, and was basically coerced into a plea deal that meant they kept all the money and it stayed off my record as long as I didn't end up in court within 2 years.

Justice is an illusion, at least in the US (and really, most other places in the world).

LAN traffic can be wirelessly sniffed from cables with $30 setup, says researcher

Re: I thought LAN cables were shielded

"LAN Cable" is rather ambiguous, but assuming CAT6/CAT6A, most people use UTP - Unshielded Twisted Pair. Dealing with STP (Shielded Twisted Pair) is a pain - you have to then get shielded connectors, deal with the foil when terminating them, and the cable itself is quite a bit more expensive, and probably heavier and larger diameter.

Generally STP is only used where it's really needed - it's recommended for a lot of outdoor runs, for example, so the shield can be tied to ground and help provide some lightning protection (and even then, a lot of outdoor-rated UTP is available).

BOFH: We must... have... beer! Only... cure... for... electromagnetic fields

Re: solution

I built a special extension cord with a bridge rectifier and filter cap soldered into the middle precisely for this reason - I had LED Christmas lights up and they were driving me nutty from the flicker. Once I built that cord for them, no more (detectable to my eye, at least) flicker, and I was much happier. I think some of the newer sets have started to add these, but certainly not all.

Re: I'm having headaches

Perhaps you have really good heat sensitivity in your hands (or whatever)... typically when a joint is a mess, it's because of knotted up muscles and inflammation, which does in fact put off heat. An inflamed joint will always be warmer than the surrounding area (unless it's recently been iced), and same with knots in the back, etc.

So that 'heat' you felt coming off the area was probably just plain heat. Most people just don't pay enough attention to their senses to notice a small heat differential like that.

Computer shuts down when foreman leaves the room: Ghost in the machine? Or an all-too-human bit of silliness?

Re: Power socket on the lighting circuit?

I strongly dislike having them fed by alternate circuits, but there are places where switches outlets are incredibly handy... as one example, I installed one at my old place (in the traditional US manner, with the top outlet switched and the bottom outlet hard-wired) on the porch, to connect Christmas lights. When it's cold and wet out, sometimes I don't even want to open the door to unplug them, and it's also handy I can connect them to an in-wall timer switch if I want.

As far as connecting the two outlets to different circuits... I don't think it's against NEC (though I'm not sure), but I would have to think really hard to come up with a good reason for it. The only one I can think of is if one expects to run high-current equipment on both outlets at the same time, it could make sense to cable them back to separate breakers... perhaps in an over-spec'd garage or a kitchen with lots of appliances, for example. Then I could run the kettle and an instant pot or high-power mixer at the same time, off the same outlet, without fears of tripping a breaker. But I (personally) still wouldn't do it that way.

Kioxia, the artist formerly known as Toshiba Memory Corporation, postpones IPO

"Adequate" is a good word.

Kioxia - Most of their stuff I've played with is not overwhelming, not really underwhelming, pretty much just whelming. Or "adequate" as the previous poster said.

Server buyers ask Lenovo for made-in-Mexico models instead of Chinese kit

Re: Part Sourced?

It may be meaningless from a security standpoint, but that's not what most of the importing companies actually care about (probably). That may be what the Indian government claims to care about, but the companies importing the kit almost certainly care more about the delays with kit sitting on in a customs warehouse when they need it than they do about the minimal security risks.

Security is likely just the buzzword they use to pressure the vendor to bring in kit from a country that's not likely to get it held up in customs.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

Re: Other people are joining in the prank?

That's the problem with Lamborghinis... the brakes are awful! It's NOT going to stop!

HTC to produce exclusive Facebook smartphone, bitch

hasn't this been done?

I wonder if they'll call it "Next-of-Kin." Or maybe being Android that would be "NexusKin." Either way, I expect it to flop just as badly.