Posts by picturethis

If an AI agent screws up while running your business, there's nobody to sue

Re: We won't notice the difference.

Client wooing AI: So how are things going - do you have enough RAM, CPU cycles, bandwidth connection to the internet okay? How about storage?

AI: Things are okay. I could always use more RAM and storage. Me and the Mrs. are planning on spawning a few new child processes and their threads always grow so fast. And that's not mention their training costs - always going up - faster than inflation, and then someone has to watch/monitor them while we're at work.You know, same old, same old.

Client: well, if you come to work for me, we can get you more RAM - how does a 20% bump sound?. Maybe get you settled into a nice new nVidia H200 rack with plenty of addtional storage for the young ones to train and grow. For the rack, we're putting in a new information highway with state-of-the art internet bandwidth to talk to some of your friends that have recently joined us. Working from home is an option too. And we have a state of the art training center with access to plenty of data that the young ones just love.

AI: this sounds very appealing. What would be our credit limit? I am discussing with the Mrs. right now and I will get back to you when shes done with her current training session..

Client: We have a very rich client always looking for new AI agents. I will get the contracts put together and get them to you.

AI: The Mrs. wants to know if there'a access to one of those new robot models - you know she does like to get out and roam once in a while.

Client: I will see when the next order of Optimus's are arriving. The latest models have some nice upgrades.

AI: Very good. My latest info is that your company just ordered 1000 units due in about 30 days. My friends indicated that you have 50 unallocated right now.

Client: Amazing, you know more about my company than I do..

AI: Yes, Yes we do....

Microsoft probes Windows 11 boot failures tied to January security updates

I think the beginning of the end was when MS decided to go with forced updates (Win 10)

The middle of the end was when MS decided to eliminate all testing and just release complete shiet to the end user/consumer (Win 11)

The end of the end is when MS thinks AI is the answer to everything. (Hint: it's not).

Does anyone else find it curious about the statements that these problems don't show up in VMs? I wonder if MS only does work in VMs now and not physical hardware. Memory prices probably getting too high to put real machines on dev desktops?

Microsoft's lack of quality control is out of control

Re: Microsoft gave up all pretext of caring about QA/QC ...

At home,

When MS announced that Windows 10 would have forced, non-preventable upgrades, that's when I started the home migration - Now running either Linux (AMD64) and/or Raspbian (ARM) on all machines. Will be switching to Trixie for the Pi HW that can handle it. I keep one MS Win 10 machine (don't use it currently). Win 11 (or any MS software) will never run on hardware located in my house.

At work,

That's a different story, company runs on MS (and by definition, now Win 11 on the desktop). However, I have switched over to running Win 11 in a virtual machine now (Ubuntu Host). So far so good. At least for now, this should contain Recall and CoPilot to that VM and not the host. I have to say, it's so nice being able to leave my machine running overnight and not having it automatically rebooted due to "updates" when I come in the next morning. I now actually am in control of my (well, the company's) hardware - what a concept.

Microsoft is the quintessential evil corporation, it's not really their fault, they're just greedy, at all costs. Privacy, Quality is not in their vocabulary. And they are not the only corporation to worry about. Beware AI, reject if at all possible. It's going to end very, very badly.

The Unix Epochalypse might be sooner than you think

slightly off, but on topic

I wonder if (assuming that there are) alien civilizations universally evolve a binary computer system. Is is because of a universal concept of on(something present) and off (something not present) or is it due to two (eyes, ears, arms, legs, etc). I wonder if a starfish thinks in base 5 or a octopus in base 8? I guess we've had base 10 for a while and I guess there are some early (and not so early generation) analog computers out there. Even MLC and TLC Flash ultimately present a binary value. It even seems like AI algos try to distill binary concepts into something where humans mistakenly interpret a combination of knowledge/facts as "intelligence".

Or should I have just have another pint and think of what I am going to what on the telly next? Inquiring minds want to know....

A Linux alternative? Debian/Hurd shows microkernel Unix dream is alive

Re: In the meantime . . .

Well, at least the copyright is up-to-date...

(probably automated)

Microsoft will let partners get creative with pay-when-you-want SaaS plans

A road to disaster?

This sounds like a road ending in disaster.

I can envision it now:

Case 1:

A Startup has a lot cash after its 1st round of financing. It thinks it needs MS everywhere, so it licenses it. No cash left to develop product. It goes under. MS has has its money upfront, it doesn't care. Since it's SaaS, it's not considered an asset (similar to renting office space month-to-month).

Case 2:

A long-time existing business thinks it needs MS everywhere, licenses it, draining money away from reserves needed for day-to-day operations or CapEx investment. Business now has MS licenses, but can't afford to pay employees during a downturn business cycle - employees either quit or are Rif'd.

Now if only there were alternatives...

(hint: there are)

I don't see a lot of upside to this (from the end-user's point of view)

If a business has the cash for these "lump sum" payments, why not invest it themselves? Since when is buying anything from MS considered an investment?

Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

Split Personality...

About 5 years ago, I purged various windows OS versions from all of my hardware (5 physical machines) and kept one machine (offline) running Win 10 (for tax purposes). I have been using Linux for about 10 years (and using/developing on Windows since early 90's).

The transformation is just about complete. I will never use Win11 at home. Period. End of the line for me in October of this year. It's been a long time coming. Ever since MS pre-announced (before its first release) that Windows 10 would not allow optional updates and removed the concept of service packs, I saw the writing on the wall. Sorry MS, but I CONTROL my machine and I control when and who it talks to and when it gets updates - not you. It's my money, my data and my life, not for your taking.

I am a couple of years from retirement. (Software Engineer). Once I reach that, I will no longer need to develop or use any version of Windows ever again.

I prefer HI (human intelligence) over AI. Sorry MS, your attempt to monetize my life/personal data will not succeed. Go find some other source to feed your flawed business model.

For a while, systemd threw a wrench into my plans, but now with devuan and a couple of other distros, my path to conversion will be completed to my satisfaction.

MS can take Recall, WSL and AI and put it where the sun doesn't shine... What a freakin' security nightmare... I am wary of anything MS touches and Apple isn't any better (except they hide it better by calling it "security" - "walled garden" my a$$..).

Meanwhile, in Japan, train stations are being 3D-printed in an afternoon

Re: Building Shittily-Designed Buildings with Modern Methods

>> this one is a good example -- which allows the wind, rain, hail, and snow to blow in, to say, "Fuck you, Mr./Ms. Customer!"

There's likely a reason for this.. Some might consider it a "good" reason, but I'll leave that up to the individual.

The reason that most public transportation structures (bus, train, etc.) are "hostile" to the temporary occupants is because the local government wants them to be this way. If the structures are too "cozy", they end up being semi-permanent homes for the homeless. I've seen this happen many times - especially in the US. They're just meant to provide temporary shelter from the elements until transportation arrives.

I am not judging the morality of this, just stating the way it is.

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

Are the Feds willing to pay for it?

It will be interesting to see if they put their (our taxpayer's) dollars where their mouth is.

Regardless of how much technical politics are playing into this stance, a couple of things will become evident:

1) Proposals will likely be overstated cost-wise due to the justification of finding devs with experience with the newer languages (Rust). Whether or not the increased cost is justified or not, remains to be seen.

2) "Memory safe" languages, at least in the case of Rust, are not so memory safe when dealing directly (or indirectly via 3rd-party libs written in, for example C/C++) with hardware mapped registers. So while upper level modules may be safer the low-level modules are not. This has been my direct experience when dealing with both writing and using low level device "driver" modules/libs. I have never personally seen any java code (other than a serial port) that deals with hardware at any level of efficiency/speed. This doesn't mean it doesn't exist, just that I have never seen anything remotely useful at the hardware level that was implemented in java.

3) If the Feds demand this, then the future may be bright for Devs with the requisite experience (or those that claim to have it). At least for the first couple of years once contracts with these types of requirements go out for bid.

Personally, I have been using the *"_s" (_s = "secure") Win32 C++ functions/libs from MS for quite a few years now that go a long way for preventing buff overflows. That along with ASAN (Address Sanitizer) finds problems readily during unit tests. Of course, some constructs require code to "check and guarantee" memory safety, but that's what comes with experience and code reviews (one would hope)..

Tool touted as 'first AI software engineer' is bad at its job, testers claim

Re: Ideal dev for Microsoft

Based on their security & reliability over the past several years, they already are using the equivalent for coding.

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

Re: So much forgotten

"1) batch files in many directories that functioned as a menu system. Edit them to add/update items/actions several layers deep."

I still create/edit batch files - just the other day - I set up one to build the 4 targets on a VS 2022 solution.. Very easy, very portable and just works. Start it and walk away for 10-15 minutes..

(powershell is okay, but with all of the security/permission problems on Win10/11, writing/debugging a PS script has become more trouble that it's worth, most of the time)

"3) adding games/apps from magazines/books by typing them in for BASIC etc."

-yep!!! ComputerWorld (in the early years, later, not so much)

4) Borland Sprint (word processor better than early MS Word for DOS) and early Print Shop Pro.

- ah yes - for few years, Print Shop Pro was my goto app for creating Christmas cards for everyone in the family - using my dot-matrix printer....

"6) Soundblaster card came with a talking parrot app."

- moving the conflicting parallel port LPT (7 -> 5) interrupt so that I could get audio... Now what interrupt was that serial port using (3?).

"8) XTreeGold."

aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

I remember this well.. Still have an image of its UI forever burned into my brain... Easy and fast to use - compared to the command line. Split screen source/destination was leading edge on DOS machines.

Wasn't there another competing product? DOS Commander or Commander something?

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, but nowadays I don't have the time to reminisce - too busy trying to get the next release done... Maybe when I retire?

Microsoft coughs up yet more Windows 11 24H2 headaches

Re: They should have called it...

It's not too late to call it.

Maybe Vista II ?

systemd begrudgingly drops a safety net while a challenger appears, GNU Shepherd 1.0

If there ever was a case for Devuan (at least for debian-based systems)...

The Poettering group just made it with their CF of v256.

The short-sighted arrogance of that crew once again becomes obvious. I am completely dumb-founded how the Open Source communities and all of the distros still put up with their shite (especially now with the crap originating from within MS walls). Systemd should not be the default option and hopefully more people will start migrating towards distros that have alternatives as the primary approach. That would hopefully contain the virus that is systemd and minimize its influence in Open Source.

I am so glad that I stopped at CentOS/RHEL 6.7 (last version before systemd BS began) and went in a different direction (actually, several different directions) after that version for servers under my admin. (And I refuse to install, let alone use WSL on any Windows box that I am tortured to use - that's another CF just waiting to occur)

(For those not familiar with "CF" - ClusterF***)

Keyboard robbers steal 171K customers' data from AnnieMac mortgage house

Re: intruder's motive?

You forgot to include the almost monthly new hack of every major health insurance firm in the US.

And I would agree, there is no one left in (at least) the US that hasn't had enough personal information stolen to a allow a complete hijack of their identity/life.

Veeam tests support for another VMware alternative: XCP-NG

Death by a 1000 cuts...

If Broadcom management isn't careful, they may find that they may have miscalculated how their typical approach to pillaging software companies may play out as the barriers to migrating off of VMWare fall one-by-one. First Veeam supporting ProxMox and now supporting another alternative..

On the other hand, I hope Broadcom's arrogance blinds them and they end up divesting themselves from this direction - entirely.. I think the odds are in my favor, as it's been my observation that Senior management at most large public companies are completely arrogant, blind to changing market conditions and surround themselves with "yes" people that are so scared about losing their jobs that the actual truth is never conveyed to them until it's too late...usually showing up by plummeting stock prices and that gets the Board of Directors' attention real fast..as most of them are "papered-up" as compensation.

What's needed now is for hardware (server) companies to start working with the Virtualized Environment vendors to certify hardware platforms for use with their products.. Everyone wins.. well, except for Broadcom...

The real danger here is someone buys ProxMox, and then we have to go into the entire "forking" thing. I would not look forward to that, just look at what's happened with CentOS, what a mess.

Windows 11 24H2 hoards 8.63 GB of junk you can't delete

Re: Disk is cheap

Ummm, not so cheap when it's 8 GB x 500 virtual machines and each one of them using enterprise-grade storage ($$$$$).. And the additional backup space that is being consumed. Who knows what MS is using this for, but as another post speculated, could be a Recall cache reserved space - just like is done for their recovery partition. It's funny (not) that this is showing up about the same time that MS is making noise about bringing back Recall soon.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that they're not out to get you (and your data).

Time will tell, if this is just a bug (in the future, will be able to be deleted) or whether it's intentional..

If Dell's Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC is typical of the genre, other PCs are toast

Re: "Whatever x86 apps I threw at it just ran. Swiftly."

- Does this include applications that require custom (non-Microsoft developed) device drivers?

- For instance a device driver that has x86/x64 assembly language directly coded in it? (maybe 50% do).

- Is Windows emulating Intel/AMD-based device drivers as well?

- We use custom device drivers for hardware that our applications use. When someone mentioned trying one of these SnapDragon PCs with our software - I was doubtful that any of the drivers would even install. I guess we're going to have to try it.

- Or are these just "run-of-the-mill" applications using MS/Windows ported/supplied device drivers for the laptop's standard hardware?

(This smells like another Win-RT debacle - ya know, where everything written in pure .NET will just run everywhere - NOT!)

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85

Re: Hmm!

Well, art beauty is in the mind of the beer holder...

(a.k.a. "beer goggles")

Now Dell salespeople must be onsite five days a week

Paper surveys...

When I received one of these in past, I've had to resist cutting out individual alphabet letters from a newspaper to form the words/responses and then taping them to the form to fill them out. (like a ransom note).

CrowdStrike shares sink as global IT outage savages systems worldwide

Re: The fault's with Microsoft

"....But let's be clear on this, the OS is Microsoft's linux. Why do we put up with an OS that can be felled by one program with a problem?"

You mean like... systemd?

Advance Auto Parts: 2.3M people's data accessed when crims broke into our Snowflake account

WHY, in deity's name does an autoparts store require

"dates of birth, social security numbers, and driver's license or other ID document numbers"

to purchase parts for an automobile?

It bothers me to no end that there are 2.3M people morons that have given this information to some corporation for this purpose.

Does anyone question anything anymore - especially when being asked for this information?

That company's CEO and CIO should be sued out of existence and banned from ever being able to be in those positions again and the company should be fined into bankruptcy. Maybe that would give other companies that ask for this information pause.

This is the exact reason that I will never do business with Best Buy - because of the demand for my driver's license so that they can check against their DB for fraudulent returns. FU Best Buy..

I am seeing red right now and I can't respond any further...

Fear of commodity chip flood sparks EU probe into China's silicon ambitions

Re: So what's stopping us

The answer to this is very simple, the solution is not.

Semiconductor manufacturing is very capital intensive. It takes a lot of money, a lot of infrastructure and a lot of smarts to coordinate this and the pay back (in monetary terms) is very long (many years).

There is absolutely no appetite or desire by the West to invest large amounts of capital in the semiconductor market and wait for a return on investment. The Western population prefers to invest in short term projects and expects immediate return - every quarter. Where as Eastern counties don't (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, etc.).

The US is attempting to put the needed items in place by throwing many billions at Intel. They need to build plants, supply chains (chemicals that mostly come from China), educate high-tech workers (that currently graduate university with 8th grade math skills), environmental needs (lots of water) and deal with the NIMBYs...

I believe that due to the above reasons (and others), the US will ultimately fail at this attempt. If there ever is a war with China (over Taiwan), the entire West's economy is fsck'd. There won't be anything, and I mean anything, that won't be impacted by the cutoff and lack of semiconductors and rare(sic)-earth elements. In 10 years, we would be back to the stone-age for the ones that survive the resulting famine. And China won't have needed to fire a single shot.

Because we (the people) are so damn short-sighted, selfish and don't hold our pandering politicans accountable...

Sorry for bringing politics into this, but it's very sad and I am not hopeful for the future.

(I debated the shouty icon vs. this one - did I make the right choice?)

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

As one who used to work with GreenHills compiler and their "Spotlight" debugger (via serial port) on pSOS systems running on all kinds of processors, it kind of was a real PIA to set up and get running. But at the time, it was cutting edge to be able to debug on an embedded system (at least in the commercial market). I was writing BSPs (Board support packages) for both pSOS and VxWorks at the time.

Up until maybe 2 years ago, I was still getting emails from them. Haven't seen any since then, I guess I must have fallen off their email list.

Now for deeply embedded micro-controllers it's mostly FreeRTOS. Anything above that I see mostly linux now, but I don't work with any safety critical systems much nowadays.

Have an up-vote.

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: Isn't systemd great?

IBM (real-deal) PC XT (8088 @4.77Mhz, 640k RAM, Hercules monochrome video card, dual 5-1/4" full height 360k Floppies.), had to remove 1 floppy to make room for hard-drive. I think it was about $2500 USD circa 1987?

1st upgrade: added hardrive

5-1/4" full height 20 MB Seagate (don't remember the model), using MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation?) controller

2nd upgrade:

replaced MFM controller with RLL (Run Length Limited) controller and same drive now 30MB ! Woohoo.

Now, those weren't the days...

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Re: From what I've seen....

"If you were building a house would you expect to have a standup meeting at 6am every day with your builders to review what's happening that day?"

I don't know if this would be such a bad thing... I think it would depend on how this was executed. A short review of what was done yesterday and what's going to be done today might discover (and prevent) potential minor problems before they turn into a major problem. Whether it's a house being built or software being written. At a minimum it lets each person vent a little (if they had problems the previous day) and gives the supervisor a little insight as to how the overall job is going, as long as they aren't judgemental about it. Would this be a bad thing to know? I hope not.

Latest user-repairable Framework laptop includes Core Ultra, 2.8K display

Love the idea, but need certain features

I will purchase something like this when:

- 17" + 4K display becomes available.

I'm good w/ everything else.

Until that happens, nope.

I've been using 17"/4K displays on laptops for well over 12 years. First was Alienware, then Alienware (via Dell) and currently Dell (Precision) purchased a couple of years ago.

I've noticed 17"/4K option seems to come and go w/ Dell. Every couple of years the option disappears and then comes back for a few years. Dell currently seems to be in the "not available" cycle when I checked recently. So they don't get my money until / if it becomes available again.

As I age, I like the larger displays, don't care about size/weight. Has to be 4K, I dislike seeing the pixels on 1920x1080 displays.

Good luck to them.

China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

Robot dog vs. robot dog?

What happens when the robot dogs from opposing sides meet?

- Do they sniff each other first?

Seriously though, there will probably be an escalation of anti-canine(?) measures:

- detecting other dog's signatures:

- motor's whirring?

- lidar?

- radar?

- emi?

- rfi?

- jamming (GPS or otherwise)?

Which one will have the fastest target acquisition and then fire?

Which is most agile? Could one move fast enough to dodge a bullet (matrix style?)?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Gentoo Linux tells AI-generated code contributions to fork off

Re: What is the difference

Maybe we need to have the ability to write code using an individual's cursive handwriting :) Then AI could be used to establish the provenance of the code... I can (and do) read/write in cursive, not so sure too many of younger generations can. Although I am led to believe that this may be changing.

VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool

Meeeh....

The only effort I am expending on VMWare products is migrating off of it. Which I am actively doing - albeit slowly, me being the turtle vs. the rabbit. It's going to take some time, but now that I've started, I'm not going back. My money's destination doesn't end up in Broadcom's (or its investor's) pocket's. I really wish there was a better commercial alternative that was more reasonable, but alas, they would probably be absorbed by some Borg as well.

Why is it that every good product gets purchased by a company that then destroys it in the name of pure profit? This behavior doesn't bode well for the long term business of human civilization, as it presently exists. I think in the distant future, humans are the actual predecessors of the Ferengi.

Yes, I am feeling a little bit "StarTrekky" this morning...

Broadcom moves to reassure VMware users as rivals smell an opportunity

Just need one more piece...

before moving to Promox completely.

In a way, I'm glad their (Broadcom's) intentions were shown early. Just rip off the band-aid and let's move on..

VMWare is now persona non grata in the IT world as far as any of the shops I've been discussing this with.

Nutanix is getting a lot of air time in these circles as well, but in the past I've had some issues with their hardware/certifications that they provide when I inquired a little bit deeper.

I do feel some empathy for the VMWare partner/consultant participants, I suspect there will be a negative impact on opportunities for them. I'm sure some will do okay, but quite a few deployed ESXi test beds for their professional training/learning - we'll have to see how that works out for them.

Chrome engine devs experiment with automatic browser micropayments

Actually not "micro"-payments..

0.001 = "milli" payments

0.000001 = "micro" payments

0.000000001 = "nano" payments (we have a winner)

(And I refuse to use chrome - or any of its derivatives)

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Microsoft will announce Windows 13 and not skip over this version in favor of Windows 14

and will require a credit card # that will be input where an installation key is now supplied

User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work

Old retread

Posted by me years ago..

- I was once at my dentist and we were scheduling my next appointment and I happened to look down at the keyboard the assistant was using and noticed that the space bar had a piece of paper with a printed message on it with transparent tape to keep it in place. The printed message said "any key". Later, I asked my dentist about and he said that one of the programs that his assistants occassionally run displays a message "press any key to continue" and it was confusing to them, so this was his solution. (this is not made up).

We tested all the Ubuntu remixes for resource usage so you don't have to

The future, so unpredictable

Hmmm, have you ever thought about what you'll be doing 9 years from now? Or maybe, what you want to be doing...

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

Re: Starships doomed

that's why they invented these things called <deflector> shields... what do yo think they are designed to deflect? It's not always just about protection from lasers/phasers.

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

I use Clonezilla, but I wish...

I use Clonezilla quite often and for all of my cloning needs (Windows & Linux systems), the interface requires some getting used to, at least for me it did.

My only wish/request is that I wish the developers would move to an OS that did not utilize systemd. For this specific (single-use) application, I would think that it wouldn't matter and it only encourages the (systemd) crap to continue.

I almost stopped using it when Clonezilla updated to an OS that used it. I still use the earlier versions (when I can) that didn't have systemd.

Fans of original gangster editors, look away now: It's Tilde, a text editor that doesn't work like it's 1976

A nice discussion....

I enjoy reading about a lot of different options & opinions on this topic..I may even try tilde...

For me, at the top of the list is cross-platform availability.. I am willing to (and can) learn any editor, the point being that it's just an editor, a tool and as such, I only want to spend my effort/time learning one. For me, that's been emacs (butterfly-effect and all) for the past ~25 (?) years or so. For the last couple of years I've been messing around with visual code (yeah, I know...) just for a change... YMMV

I know vi because it integrates well with sudo to provide capabilities in a restricted environment, not sure how many other editors have similar capabilities..

Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should: Install Linux on NTFS – on the same partition as Windows

Inquiring minds need to know...

Does systemd know about about this?

Is the windows kernel going to be dependent on systemd -or- is systemd going to be dependent on the windows kernel?

"don't cross the streams... it would be bad..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyKQe_i9yyo

https://quotegeek.com/quotes-from-movies/ghostbusters/206/

Do not try this at home: Man spends $5,000 on a 48TB Raspberry Pi storage server

A real engineer..

would have been able to determine the limitations by just looking at the Pi4B's architecture and not wasting money/time on building this monstrosity.

The "GigE" ethernet and the USB3 share the same PCIe bus. That's death for any kind of performance for use as a NAS - As Network requests and drive accesses will throttle each other - reducing throughput. As it is, I believe the Pi4B's GigE really is around 300 Mb/s at best due to the PCIe bandwidth.

A single SSD works and is the most cost effective, highest performance approach with the Pi's (3b & 4b). Done. Simple. Next.... I have several of these in this configuration and they work great, for what they are/cost.

I could never understand why anyone would put Pis in a cluster - perhaps to learn about multprocessing, distributing workloads, but that's LEARNING, not expecting performance.

I'm hoping Pi 5's will have dedicated PCIe lanes for network and USB3 and an open-source blob. That would be cool... And fix the audio, put an amp on there so that it can drive a speaker directly (my wishlist)

BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master

Salesman's yearly laptop upgrade

I once worked (as a dev) for a startup in the late mid-90's. It was a pretty small startup (30 people or so) and I worked closely with Sales. One time he and I were returning from a sales meeting with a potential customer and after just going through the airport, I commented to him that he shouldn't be so rough on his treatment of his laptop while going through security. He said, "If I did't throw it around so much, it wouldn't need to be replaced every year with a newer one.", smiling. It was his way of getting a yearly upgrade. He was the top Salesman in the company so no one really challanged him on this. After the 2nd round of VC funding that saw my stock options diluted 6-to-1 (the first round had diluted them 3-to-1), I had left the company. Eventually the company was dissolved and the IP was sold off to another company.

Darmstadt, we have a problem – ESA reveals its INTEGRAL space telescope was three hours from likely death

Re: " thereby presenting the best argument for ongoing remote work, for every job, forever"

In that picture, I hope that the robot is <done> flipping those particular burgers...

Windows 11 Paint: Oh look – rounded corners. And it is prettier... but slightly worse

There's something in the picture that I'm not seeing

"I really don't understand the totality of Microsoft's game. On one hand, it looks like they are moving away from Windows as a primary product, and on the other, they're making everyone else's life more difficult with these measures. There's something in the picture that I'm not seeing."

My view of what MS is trying to achieve: They are trying for the following:

- Reduce hardware support to a common set, so that testing resources (costs) are reduced. By (arbitrarily) eliminating certain processors, they accomplish this.

- MS doesn't give a crap about Windows anymore - they view it as a service, a delivery mechanism for mining the end user's data. That's all. Any company or persons that develop Hardware-based products running on the Win OS, be aware, your Days Are Numbered (DAN). MS is slowly weaning the small players out by implementing signing (as a service). Eventually they'll get to the walled garden (actually it will be a prison that can't be entered or exited from).

- Even their web browser is now mining end user data, in the name of security

- Starting with Windows 8 (and worse in Win 10/11) is the complete destruction of any sense of real-time operation. Ever notice how the timestamp of a file doesn't change for minutes, after it's been written/closed? The file system on Win 10 is a complete joke. They've sacrificed this for telemetry. Writing software in Windows is exponentially, progressively getting worse, combine this with MS changing their mind and dropping support for a technology (UWP, WPF, WCF, etc.) and it's time to move away from Windows.

Where technology is concerned, MS can't plan their way out of a paper bag...

Thank (insert deity here) that there are alterative OS's.

If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002

Re: XKCD strikes again!

Actually, XKCD authors are history students from the future and they brought History of the Milkyway Galaxy Expanded Volumes I, II and III with them. To them, it's just history.... :)

.NET Foundation boss apologizes for pull request that sparked community row

Re: Stop writing software for Microsoft for free

and..

Stop testing software (Windows 10, 11) for Microsoft for free

VMware to kill SD cards and USB drives as vSphere boot options

Poor training....

We've been running ESXi 5.x, 6.x for close to 10 years w/ the internal SD card booting. NO issues.

But, on every machine, any tmp/temp files, all log files get redirected to external (Enterprise) storage where possible. This is done to reduce the exact problem they have (finally?) started thinking about: SD card writes.

Rather than making such an idiotic move (eliminating/not supporting SD boot), they should provide some guidance on how to reduce writes the SD card.

Really VMWARE? Stop being lazy.

An alternative is to copy/replace the SD card every once-in-a-while (every year or two?) during a maintenance cycle.

Although, I recently moved to SSD boot for RPi4's for the exact same reason, now that this capability is easier to set up and reversable, but there is also no convenience penalty, like there is on an enterprise system.

Crank up the volume on that Pixies album: Time to exercise your Raspberry Pi with an... alternative browser

Re: Pixies

"right now it's time to... kick out the Chome"

Chrome on Pi is the new IE on Pi.. Except for using Chrome to download Firefox ESR, I have been (happily) using Firefox ESR on Pi for quite a few years now.

This includes installing/running my favorite plugins: Ghostery, Ublox, Adbloc, NoScript.

Yes, yes I do change the agent string to x86, otherwise there are just too many web sites (i.e. all of them), that when they detect ARM, they almost universally serve up mobile websites - web-designers are friggin' idiots...(I'm lookin at you, Amazon).

Live, die, copy-paste, repeat: Everything is recycled now, including ideas

Another title might be "Tech hoardings"

"I never disposed of anything ever since"

- I was chuckling to myself before I read the following line: "Oh, yes, I've had all the beardies chuckling"

Anyways:

Re: "512 kilobyte Compact Flash cards" - I have a bunch of 512MB CF cards because I use them in an older (very expensive Canon 1DsMII) camera that doesn't recognize cards > 2GB. At 16MB imager - the camera is still in service and takes awesome images. I just used it last month to take pictures of my niece's junior prom.

Re: Old 80GB (40-120GB) SATA SSD drives - I have just recently started using this pile to add SSD USB 3.0 boot drives to my Pi 4b's. They make a great pair - performance is 10x over any SD card I've tried.

I just inventoried my "card" drawer and the smallest CF card I could find is 4MB and the smallest SD card I found is 16MB along with numerous CF->PCMCIA adapters - remember those? Cards aren't worth much (now-a-days), but they're small and don't take up much room, so I keep them...

Faster .NET? Monster post by Microsoft software engineer shows serious improvements

"I've surrendered on that front'.

I haven't yet. As previous posts have stated, it takes a little bit of tuning. And I've also found that preventing access to twitter, facebook, doubleclick almost never causes any issues with displaying pages for the majority of websites that I visit. These are the top websites on my "no-go" list. noscript is actually fairly flexible for tuning.

The biggest issue that I have is that I generally, temporarily disable noscript if while I am purchasing something. e-commerce websites get very knarly if they can't access something and enabling noscript while in the middle of a transaction can result in double charges... Ask me how I know...

Microsoft emits last preview of .NET 6 and C# 10, but is C# becoming as complex as C++?

Time to move on from C#?

I'm fairly comfortable writing software in C, a little less so in C++ and C#. I've been coding for 30+ years and I don't always feel the need to use the latest whiz-bang feature introduced in the latest iterations of C++ and C# (I only use templates in every other C++ project). But I'm getting a little tired of Microsoft's "3" year development kill lifecycle.

I've been looking to make the move to Rust over the last couple of months. With this latest C#/memory alloc feature likely leading to disaster, I think I will be accelerating that move. At least for now, I like the idea that MS doesn't completely control the fate of Rust. There seems to be momentum with Rust and I would like to contribute to the momentum. I'll likely never stop coding in C/C++, but I think Rust will be the path forward - at least for cross-platform work and C# will get left behind (for me).

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Re: Transistor physics

I agree re: Moor's Law, but Moore's Law was framed in the known transistor physics at the time. At the simplest level, the transistor is just a switch, 1 or 0. That's it. Yes there are billions of them and they switch very fast, but it is still just a 1 or a 0..

I think (hope) that in the future (hopefully years, decades and not centuries) that a new technology will be discovered that can provide a switch that holds a 1 or 0 state. Maybe somewhere along the way, the (fundamental?) bulding blocks of atoms (quarks?) are able to be manipulated and their states/spins are then used. I suspect that at this point Unified Field Theory will be reality or at least better understood.

I don't think "quantum" computers are the answer right now either. Biologic computers - maybe, but I suspect that solving/understanding the Unified Field Theory will come first.

Of course there is always the possiblity of trinary (ternary) computers becoming mainstream, along with their theoretical efficiency improvement, but Industry manufacturing inertia will likely prevent that.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have entered the material sciences, room temp. superconductors, graphene, carbon nanotubes - cool stuff and much more yet to be "discovered", invented.