Posts by bill 27

Alaska Air phones a friend to find out what caused massive October outage

There's a lesson to be learned here.

Perhaps Alaska will learn the dangers of flying on a Cloud.

Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm

Re: hydrogen silsesquioxane

I think it's considered immoral to utter that in mixed company.

Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects

You live in a sparsly populated place.

"this writer has many neighbors and can report five or six other networks visible"

This reader can see 17, and it's a quiet day.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Got it.

And there you have it.

On Monday the 23rd (Happy Summer Solstice!) the ship, and it's cargo, sank. While being watched over by 2, or more, "rescue" vessels who apparently made no effort to intervene.

apnews{dot}com{slash}article{slash}car-carrier-sinks-aleutian-islands-5eec64f6bad760cf3ebbb4c810f78b68

Got it.

"The ship is now likely to continue burning until specialized fire-fighting crews arrive and attempt to halt the blaze."

This is Diplospeak for "We'll talk about it for a while, until it's to late to actually do anything about it, and declare 'unfortunately it's to late to take any effective action'." Then let the ship and cargo have a quiet burial at sea.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

Re: This is all for billionaires like Musk

The trip I was considering was LAS to LGK. Flights would have been LAX (2hr layover), SIN (1h 20m layover), KUL (2h 45m layover), and finally LGK.

Re: This is all for billionaires like Musk

"pay double to fly it in half the time I might be tempted"

I recently decided I was going skip a tourist type trip that I was thinking of taking. I looked at the 28.5 hours to get from point A to B and decided I didn't want to sit in an airplane that long. That was the cheap seat. When I saw your statement I thought "OK, so what's it cost to get there the fastest way possible?" It can be done 2.5 hours faster, at 7.8 times the cost, don't think I want to do that either. FWIW the return trip is a hour quicker for both.

The final bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS update arrives

Re: Stupid question.

PRETTY_NAME="Raspbian GNU/Linux 11 (bullseye)"

inxi shows the same and

Machine: Type: ARM Device System: Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Rev 1.2

As far as a complete install goes...it wouldn't hurt that much. I actually have 4, maybe 5 they're in different locations so I can put my fingers on them all, of them laying around. 3 are simply looping though a, large, playlist of mp3 music 24x7. The remainder(s) just have rust and cargo loaded so I can try to teach myself the language.

Stupid question.

I have a 3B that I installed 2023-05-03-raspios-bullseye-armhf-full.img on, and have tried to keep up to date using the command:

sudo apt-get update -y --fix-missing && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y --fix-missing

Is this the equivalent of "zypper dup", as you can see I'm not well versed in multiple flavors of linux.

IRS hopes to replace fired enforcement workers with AI

Wonder what companies AI

is going to be trained on all that IRS historical/current taxpayer data.

Pentagon declares war on 'outdated' software buying, opens fire on open source

Let's call this what it is...

wide open, no oversight, no bid, sole-source contracts.

Soviet probe from 1972 set to return to Earth ... in May 2025

I don't care!

I live at 61.2N

It's what all those people get for living down there in the high-heat zone.

US to slap up to 3,521% tariffs on SE Asian solar imports – especially you, Cambodia

Neat!

One way to decrease unemployment. Think of all those people who will find employment as Solar Panel smugglers. Plus it gives those Guard people something new to look for.

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

Re: It's like deja vu all over again.

Yeah, got called into work in the dead of the night because the NT server that was the primary for DNS resolution malfunctioned. The secondary DNS box, another NT server, also had malfunctioned. I restarted them. In looking into the problem the resolution came down to...drum roll...a faulty printer driver.

It's like deja vu all over again.

I have a screenshot of the end result of installing some software on a WinNT Server way back in practically pre-history. It says "The XXXXX service depends on the YYYYY service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully."

Trump tariffs forcing rethink of PC purchases stateside

Re: Acer,... upped the price of its PCs in the US by 10 percent to compensate

The tariff money goes into the Federal pile of money. Next year they'll point at how much money the government has and that there should be a tax break, that only works if you make enough money.

Re: Buy today!

I did. The day after the election I ordered enough bits'n pieces to assemble 2 computers to replace some old ones. BTW, the price of those parts has already gone up, maybe 10% and that was without a tariff.

NASA's on-again, off-again job cuts – what's the plan?

I'm not worried. The solution is simple, Don't Look Up.

Trump’s DoD CISO pick previously faced security clearance suspension

Re: Messing with careers

Yup, I had a TS at one time. So long ago that there was no such thing as the SCI. It's certainly pounded into your head, with frequent reminders, what you can/cannot do, why and what can happen if you screw-up.

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Oh well, just another reason to not buy HP products. I gave up on them when they tried to charge me for repairing a PC I'd sent back under a RMA, because the power supply had failed for the second time. The warranty ran out while it was being repaired, so they wanted to charge me.

Acer signals 10% laptop price hike in US, blames Trump's extra China tariff

Tariff - A Federal sales tax.

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

Somewhere along the line I've used all three of those packages. I'm not a wordsmith. For my wife it was trying to print mailing labels with Word that did it. I printed them off with no problem using openoffice(?) or libreoffice(?). Within days I was formatting her Windows computer (along with all the paid for software) and installing linux.

Microsoft vet laments a world where even toothbrushes need reboots

Used to joke at work..."Ah, moved the mouse! Gotta reboot."

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

I know! We can use that big pot of money that's just laying around at the Social Security Administration. Then there's the fuel tax money that's never spent on road maintenance anyhow.

Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall

Hmmm...

There may be more than one problem here. I've been getting emails telling me my account is locked.

Dire warnings! Oh the humanity! Oh that's right...I don't have a Capital One account.

Intel, AMD engineers rush to save Linux 6.13 after dodgy Microsoft code change

Re: Intel x86_64 is part of the problem

Not to be to picky about it...But it sounds like Windows also "has a problem with the complexity of the x86_64 hardware ecosystem".

Tongue-zapping spoons, tea-cooling catbots, lazy vacuums and more from CES

Oh well...

Just when I was going to consign Rachael, my Roomba, to the scrap heap. I find that a Neuralink might be adversely affected by the Saros Z70, and I was really looking forward to not using a clicker to channel surf.

Trump's tariff threats could bump PC prices by almost half

Been there...done that...

The day after the election, November 6, I ordered some stuff. Here it is two months later and the price for those parts has risen at least 20%.

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

Leave Rome, 6 hours to Dubai, 2.5 hour layover, 13.75 hours to Sydney. Try to sleep at hotel, to wired. Final 2.75 hour flight to destination the next afternoon. Then again there was that LAX to SYD flight once upon a time. So in my opinion fast is good. As far as train service in Europe goes...it's great. But you're not gonna jump on a SST to fly from Venice to Amsterdam, or want to ride a train for that matter..

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

Actually I enjoy not living near my family.

Put your usernames and passwords in your will, advises Japan's government

Gonna be expensive.

Every time a password ages out you're supposed to change it (you do change them regularly don't you). Then you get to amend, get notarized, and refile your will (possibly along with ancillary documents). Then again my executor had the audacity to kick the bucket before me...and the document(s) needs to be redone...soon as I find a Round Tuit.

As far as the lockbox goes...when they burglarized my house the hauled off my 4 lockboxes.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Just for fun...

Last week I had a computer I was going to give away/toss in the trash. So I reproduced a situation, from several decades ago, just to see if it would do the same thing.

As root I:

cd /

rm -vfr *

I'm nosy I like to see what's happening...but basically it just locked up after a while. The time before at least it said something at the end...I got a kernel panic.

Crooks stole personal info of 77k Fidelity Investments customers

Kinda sorta depends.

' Fidelity claims the information obtained by the data thieves only "related to a small subset of our customers." '

If you're one of the "77,099 people" then it's not such a small subset.

Submer dives into $55.5M funding to cool down hot-blooded AI datacenters

Re: consume water ?

Actually the keyword is "hotter". Somebody's gonna need to install cooling fins on the Earth.

Re: consume water ?

Uhhhmmm...doesn't that just make it hotter and steamier someplace else?

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Weeeellll...it's like this...

My boss asked me to not answer the phone...even if I was the only person there.

Thunderbird is go: 128 now out with revamped 'Nebula' UI

Re: Why the Downvotes?

I agree. I do a nightly encrypted backup of /home. I have the last 14 available. If I leave where the computer is, for anything over a day, I take a copy of the last backup with me on a USB (encrypting the encrypted backup in case the USB is lost, I'm not paranoid...but I play one on TV).

Call, text logs for 110M AT&T customers stolen from compromised cloud storage

Meanwhile...

In an email (this week) I was informed...

"Ticketmaster recently discovered that an unauthorized third party obtained information from a cloud database hosted by a third-party data services provider. Based on our investigation, we determined that the unauthorized activity occurred between April 2, 2024, and May 18, 2024. On May 23, 2024, we determined that some of your personal information may have been affected by the incident."

...

"The personal information that may have been obtained by the third party may have included your name, basic contact information, and payment card information such as encrypted credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates."

Glad it wasn't anything important and they rushed right out to tell me about it. As a stroke of luck I'd lost my CC and was issued a new one recently.

Misconfigured cloud server leaked clues of North Korean animation scam

Cartoon image.

Love the image. So much that I use it as the login screen/wallpaper on a couple of computers.

'Chemical cat' on the loose in Japanese city

Re: Poor Kitty

Yup. Considering the first thing it would have done is try to lick itself clean/dry.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

I recall back in the bad old days when sometimes the UNIX box wouldn't run X...boot into single user mode and I'd end up root. vi was the tool to fix whatever was wrong, and the sh would change too since things were generally statically linked, couldn't count on libraries being available.

FCC boss says 25Mbps isn't cutting it, Americans deserve 100Mbps now, gigabit later

HAHAHA!

I'm doing good to get 2MB down and 500K up! Then there's whole reduction in speed if I go over my monthly data cap.

North Korean satellite had no military utility for spying, says South Korea

Re: What was this satellite for?

"(which surely still belongs to North Korea)"

Does it? How far off-shore was it recovered, may it was in international waters? Flotsam, jetsam, lagan, derelict and all that nautical crap.

Clippy designer was too embarrassed to include him in his portfolio

It LIVES!

As shown by...

www.eviscerati.org/comics/hd/2023/01/you-must-unlearn/

Tesla batteries went from fully charged to fully disabled after botched patch, lawsuit claims

Re: Everybody throttles

"I spend another pile of money for a new peripheral to replace one that won't work anymore"

Now, now relax. Just because I'm using a nice 15ppm HP laser printer that I was gifted by my lawyer 25 years ago when the latest/greatest software upgrade orphaned it...My total investment, other than electricity when I turn it on, is a replacement toner cartridge (possibly two, been a long time).

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

Didn't call me...

But boy did the politicians call...and call...and call...and call...then they started sending me text messages...

iFixit stabs batteries – for science – so you don't have to

Re: Hmmm

As Phil said. I've firsthand experience with that situation. Blew a small fortune dumping large amounts of baking soda/water solution into the engine compartment. Metal radiator cap worked it's way loose and shorted the positive anode to ground...driving along minding my own business, about a mile from home, and there was this dull boom/thud from the front of the vehicle.

Re: Energy has to go somewhere

Lucky it didn't arc. Happened to someone I knew, finals on a UHF transmitter.

Logitech, that canary in PC coal mine, just fell off its perch

My preferred device.

I've got 4 keyboards within my sight are they're all Logitech KB/Mouse combos. There's another couple at my other place. Lately I buy parts and build my own machines.

NASA to send prototype robot surgeon into space

Re: May I just be the first to say-

*initial_incision_complete*

*probes_inserted*

*appendix_removal_initiated*

*system_reboot_in_progress_please_wait*