* Posts by Luiz Abdala

555 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007

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Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Luiz Abdala
Pint

Re: V'Ger

Well, the screen is 94 billion lightyears wide, so it will take a while to travel 47 billion of those and pop on the other side...

We won't be around to see it looping back, though. I hope it evolves past our Universe as it does.

I'll drink to that.

The end of classic Outlook for Windows is coming. Are you ready?

Luiz Abdala
Facepalm

PST files were a curse and a blessing.

2GB limits were a disaster to recover back in the day, but, back then "no more than 20MB on the server per user" was a common feature of Exchange.

Having the option to manage that, offline, should exist on an full-blown installed app designed to handle e-mail. Period.

Sure, yeah, these days everybody has gobs of gigabytes on their servers, but people must have the option to forego online repositories altogether.

God I hated to manage those, but there were no better options.

So does everything else. Every single feature you use, or don't use, should remain available to those who use them.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

Luiz Abdala
Trollface

Re: A fool and his money

Clip-on ties were invented FOR A REASON.

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Re: A fool and his money

You may suddenly notice that the rented printers are from a model that doesn't exist on the market (maybe *not anymore*), have beefy reinforced steel innards instead of plastic, and never break down, since they are making money *per printed page*, not regardless of it..

They may even be Laserjet 4000's...

Logitech MX Brio 705 – where Ultra HD meets Ultra AI

Luiz Abdala
Facepalm

Drivers?

I bought a camera from Logitech eons ago, unrelated to this model. (quickcam pro 9000)

The driver installation was abysmal, the sofware side of the thing crashed often and hard. It also had the auto-framing and face-tracking, placing a velociraptor over your face like a vtuber thing.

The icing on the cake happened when I just plugged it on a playstation 3, of all things, and the console just played it like it was native. I think it was developed for Unix or Linux, not Windows.

So, logitech cameras left me with a sore eye...

Tiny Core Linux 15 stuffs modern computing in a nutshell

Luiz Abdala
Windows

Run from a ROM Chip

Remember the days when DOS came in a ROM chip? Yeah, this thing could come on a chip on the motherboard.

Hell, instead of those BIOS interfaces we all know and hate, we could boot into this, gpart a nvme partition with NTFS, install Windows 11 or whatever you want and go from there. Imagine an OS that can't be infected because it is read-only by force. If you want to update it, chuck the chip off and insert an updated one. It could include a recorder so you can update it yourself.

Just a thought.

FOSS replacement for Partition Magic, Gparted 1.6 is here to save your data

Luiz Abdala
Windows

I love GParted. And loved partition magic.

Don't know a lick of Linux, but this gem saved my bacon a couple of times, with a windows-like interface. Altough back then it didn't dare to screw with NTFS partitions unless it asked your permission and you knew it could implode your files.

Glad to know it still exists.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Luiz Abdala
Holmes

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

Hanlon's Razor is hard to believe on this one. Nobody would be such a twat to drag an anchor for 200km without ill intent.

Or maybe they would?

Luiz Abdala
Stop

Guess what happens next?

Who's gonna pay to not just lay new cables, but also bury them beyond anchor-scraping distance?

Cost-benefit?

Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks

Luiz Abdala
Devil

Disney "Treasured Guest".

Learn from the Professionals.

Those rude parents with snotty little kids that kicked Mickey Mouse in the shins and spilled ice cream on Minnie's Dress are named "Most Treasured Guests".

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

Luiz Abdala

Re: Follow the loss

Australia has training models with electric motors.

( https://flyone.com.au/skycademy/ )

It is great for that particular application, because short 20 min flights, never leaving the same base, but... it is a fixed wing aircraft.

That training plane becomes a glider should the juice ever run out. One of the greatest barrier-to-entry for commercial pilots training is the cost per flight-hour on actual flying aircraft.

Can this thing autorotate?

Luiz Abdala
Black Helicopters

How is that different from any helicopter?

Oh yes it is autonomous, so one extra passenger seat. But it has the same size of a regular heli, has downwash like any heli, suffers turbulence all the same... let's assume the machine can overcome all of this, fine. You can't just squeeze that thing where no human pilot dares to land, can you? You need the same helipads as human pilots do, right?

AND you are turning the potential pilot/supervisor of a fleet into a stressed ATC at the same time when he has to talk to the actual ATC on behalf of each one of the drones of his fleet. One flick of a button and he could be talking about drone A when he is supervisiing drone B on a completely different route.

Think about forgetting the KVM switch and throwing inputs on the wrong server. There is one way that could go right and a couple dozen ways it can go wrong.

Oh yeah, a lot of kinks to iron out.

Moving to Windows 11 is so easy! You just need to buy a PC that supports it!

Luiz Abdala
Joke

I upgraded to a...

Ryzen 5800x on a vintage b550 motherboard. Relatively fresh CPU, just a couple years behind, way more than what I need actually. Decent rig.

"You cannot upgrade to Win 11" - Fine then. Don't bother me again.

YOU CANNOT UPGRADE TO WIN 11 - alright then don't, move on.

I SAID YOU CANNOT UPGRADE TO WINDOWS EEEELLLEEEVEEENNN!!!ELEVENTYONE!!!! - Stop pushing for it then, geez.

Every Microsoft patch tuesday the warning would get bigger and more obnoxious on the Win10 control panel.

You're not imagining things – USB memory sticks are getting worse

Luiz Abdala
Windows

Portable NVME enclosures.

I am looking at portable NVME enclosures with USB 3.0 interfaces and finding them more appealing by the day.

You sacrifice a lot of speed, but NVME is designed as high speed with the matching endurance, while skirting all those issues.

You could have heard a pin drop: Virgin Galactic reports itself to the FAA

Luiz Abdala
Angel

Captive pins

I myself love things with captive pins, where you detach stuff, but the pins remain secured to one of the parts, and can only be removed by some sort of spring or tools that subject it to forces in directions that happen to be almost impossible during use.

Guns and cars - things that might kill anybody involved - have a load of them.

By the way, points to Virgin Galactic for the self-report.

And some sort of redesign could prove interesting to make on that particular pin. Like, does it need to be detachable from BOTH aircraft during flight?

IPv4 address rentals to mint millions of dollars for AWS

Luiz Abdala
Unhappy

Nickel and dime.

If only that money went to better wages for their employees so they get off food stamps...

Amazon doing amazon things.

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

Luiz Abdala
Pint

8 megabytes?

I read somewhere that the machines with Windows 3.11 on the bare metal had 8MB. Not gigabytes, not terabytes, but whooping 8MB of RAM.

I think even LCD monitors (that weren't a thing on those days except for the shiniest new laptop of the era) have CPUs with that amount on the cache now.

I wonder if you could run a dedicated ITX board (or similar) with a modern CPU, that runs a very compact VM (linux?), that uses solely cpu cache as memory, and leaves 8MB for the emulated Windows 3.11 to run.

If you can't upgrade to another bare Windows 11 metal, maybe you can run the whole thing on a raspberry-like board (?) running a VM and keep all the retro-compatible serial ports, maybe get IDE-to-microSD storage and whatnot.

I am amazed the whole thing still works.

The Land Before Linux: Let's talk about the Unix desktops

Luiz Abdala
Windows

20 years on

I don't know a lick of Linux or BSD or whatever. I just know that I took a 20 year old program made for Windows 98, tried to run it Windows 10 with all the compatibility modes turned on, and the thing simply refused to run. Well, at least Windows managed to show an error message stating a no-go.

If any flavor of Linux can support that age-old code or trigger a self-update to support old code in the same conditions at least, than it's eons ahead.

And I'll drink to that.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

Luiz Abdala
Go

How about a physical differential?

A simple axle, a diff, and a solenoid actuacted locking pin on said diff.

There goes a DIY as a challenge for the mechanically inclined.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Luiz Abdala
Meh

Autocad, Catia, Blender, Unreal Engine, Nvidia...

From what I understand, these days, people create mechanical objects in Autocad or Catia or whatever, export them to Unreal Engine or Blender, where you can add non-mechanical objects like people, add "bones" to get them animated, or use mocap or whatever, and then create a fully realized, walkable interactive environment that will be rendered in real time in a Nvidia RT or AMD or even Intel GPU card.

These are neither easy nor streamlined nor synergistic to employ.

In none of these processes I've heard that any Apple product does it faster, or better, than any of these either separately or combined. If they wanted to make really a dent in 3D operations, they would have to integrate all of these in a streamlined fashion, including motion capture.

I have seen a youtuber capable of using Blender, and he inserted himself in a Gran Theft Auto environment. Another uses a motion capture suit and Half Life Source to look like any of the assets in Source and for example pretend to be player in Counter-Strike or Gordon Freeman.

Apple may be great for video editing, but 3D, nope. They could catch up if they found a killer app...

Can solar power be beamed down from space? Yes. Is it commercially viable? Not yet

Luiz Abdala
Headmaster

Re: Ok, Dyson Swarm?

That's a Swarm that could be in Lagrange orbital point around the Sun and Earth, the Earth itself, the Moon, whatever. We call it Dyson Swarm when it's orbiting the sun directly then. Potato, potato.

Still a bunch of solar panels floating in space beaming their energy to somewhere in any microwave frequency of choice.

In fact, it would be a great idea to put them in stationary orbit on the moon, sunny side, if we want a Moon colony with power, while not directly landing there.

Luiz Abdala

Ok, Dyson Swarm?

I read through the article and all that I understood was Dyson Swarm, a precursor to a Dyson Sphere, where you just plant a bajillion solar panels in orbit.

Neat.

Windows Server 2022 patch is breaking apps for some users

Luiz Abdala
Windows

Totally unrelated?

That happened to me yesterday. Except it was a Windows 10 machine, Google Chrome didn't open as it should, and Opera GX opened right away when I asked for the same page.

Unrelated?

Atari 400 makes a comeback in miniature form

Luiz Abdala
Pint

Re: Side question: Why does the Atari 2600 have the cartridge slot built like at an angle like that?

The PCB being tilted I was kinda expecting. (Still there is nothing ergonomic about having no leverage to slam the cartridge in.)

Yeah, I never did that, I always had my consoles top view unobstructed, exactly because cartridges.

Fascinating teardown. Apple would have a seizure seeing something so accessible and easy to repair! I'll drink to that.

Luiz Abdala
Boffin

Side question: Why does the Atari 2600 have the cartridge slot built like at an angle like that?

It makes no sense whatsoever building that slot in an angle, on something you are meant to exert some physical force to put a cartridge in.

Every single console after that had the cartridge slot flat against a well paded PCB where you can shove said cartridge with confidence... except, again, for NES itself that you were meant to input sideways AND twist it down.

What was the point of that angle? I know at least one cloned ATARI machine that had the cartridge slot built flat, with a vertical insertion, like the Sega Genesis, Master System, Nintendo 64....

https://cdn.awsli.com.br/800x800/17/17021/produto/3797680/fa449296fd.jpg

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Luiz Abdala
Joke

I'm ok with a foul language every now and then on a rare error...

But ACTUAL "halt and catch fire" interrupts concern me. Like, systems that will actually have a "thermal event" upon error.

Call me names all day long as you divide by zero, but don't just explode or melt on my face.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Luiz Abdala
FAIL

Re: Would I pay a ransom? No.

And people scoff of printed hard copies of *important* stuff like contracts.

Or a locked pdf in a offline thumb drive, at least.

BOFH: Nice air conditioning system. Would be a shame if anything happened to it

Luiz Abdala

I was already joyful when I managed to find a guy to run CAT 5 through my home for 50 bucks. If there's automation of any sort, even with wireless objects, they will need a hard line out eventually...

It's not all watching transparent TV from a voice-commanded bidet. CES has work stuff too

Luiz Abdala
Angel

Re: Fidget Spinner charged keyboard?!?

Ah yes, the wireless everything crowd we all forgot. I never saw anyone confortably typing from a couch/sofa/recliner. Ever.

However, people recovering from surgery in Hospitals might benefit from those. Or a cellphone.

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Fidget Spinner charged keyboard?!?

That has to be the most obnoxious, inane idea ever conceived. 5 full minutes of fidgeting to get half an hour...

You will be looking for a replacement in one month, tops. A logitech keyb with a single (or two?) AA batteries lasts 1 year+.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Luiz Abdala
Pirate

HP was driven out of the Brazilian market once Epson made bulk ink printers! HAHAHAH

Epson decided to study our Brazilian market, and simply had to drop every single ink racketeering scheme HP used if they wanted to survive. People were modding their printers' cartridge to suck paint straight out of a GALLON installed outside the printer with IV lines drawing it in. It worked flawslessly.

Epson then made a printer where you buy a liquid vial and squeeze it on the printer tank. You buy a 75cc vial of ink for 5 dollars. No more cartridges.

Now considering that ink for printers cost CENTS PER GALLON, they are still overcharging it by 1000% or more and making due profit, but not in the level that HP is doing on the rest of the planet.

It was a massive piracy industry that drove every single HP inkjet model out of business. It hit so hard that even they had to launch bulk ink models on these parts. And because it is a LIQUID, you can't put a chip floating in a liquid, altough with nanomachines they may try to dilute them on the paint.

Epson recovered market from the pirates, with due merit, but I refuse to buy a HP inkjet printer ever again.

How thermal management is changing in the age of the kilowatt chip

Luiz Abdala
Thumb Up

Water cooling.

Yeah, Water Cooling for home use is nothing new.

But uh... do you just add a 1/4" pipe and quick disconnects to each RU and pump cold water from a chiller outside with a tiny pump straight on the chip like an AIO? Using water straight in the pipes would make so much sense. Instead of HVAC, you just get a large" pipe with 4C water feeding the whole rack or room pumped from outside.

I mean, Nuclear Power plants do it with 20 inch pipes, why not?

Did anybody come up with standards for water piping on this already?

Bricking it: Do you actually own anything digital?

Luiz Abdala

I miss the simpler times...

...When Eletronic Arts reverse-engineered the Sega Genesis /Mega Drive and was about to make custom cartridges and sell them (REGARDLESS of copyright and be sued out of existence) with their own manufacturing and code, but Sega made a deal with them to license the games in the last minute with better royalties.

(Imagine this, Sega saw the yellow-tabbed cartridges working perfectly fine in the console, and panicked!)

If we could just do that and jailbreak all forms of media to run whatever we want, and not be blocked to run whatever the makers don't want us to run...

That's why retro gaming exist, and a myriad of emulator makers are in the scene.

In the games department, the reaction already begun.

FCC really, truly won't give SpaceX nearly a billion bucks for Starlink rural broadband

Luiz Abdala
FAIL

Internet in Brazil was very expensive, until competition.

First, nothing prevents Musk from launching his Satellites out of his own pocket.

Second, everybody wants a monopoly on any given region and charge whatever they want... far more than Starlink base plan.

I'm not saying Elon deserved the money, but people deserve better access, be it him or anybody else, just for the sake of driving prices down.

That's why the USA is one of the last places on earth where 2 -10 mbps on ISDN or ADSL or what have you is something,.

Brazil of all places, had a state monopoly where landlines were a fortune. On an open market, I am paying the equivalent of 20 USD for 500 mbps /down /month on fiber, but I am in a metropolitan area. On the boondocks, the prices are entirely another thing.

This is an epic fail.

BOFH: Just because we've had record revenues doesn't mean you get a Xmas bonus

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Wasn't a murder robot stored in the basement?

Ah, I think that one was disabled last year.

Honda cooks up an electric motorbike menu, with sides of connectivity

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Pizza delivery and Chinese food will need at least 25 EV bike chargers each.

I am serious. Dominos and other Ifood chains here have 25-30 bikes parked up front, regular gas ones, at any single time. They spend a great deal of time there just waiting for orders. If anybody wants to be serious about EV bikes, then you should consider fleets and where to put an absurd amount of battery chargers in the tiniest of physical installations. Perhaps if you could daisy chain said bikes with beefy connectors as they can be, and limit to 3 in a row, and make them talk to each other like a HUGE USB hub...

The home user is probably going to wheel the bike to the back door and charge it off the kitchen 110V sockets over night. May I suggest 100 ft. cords rolled within them?

This should be their target audience, no fancy shmancy infotainment. Fleet of delivery guys are the only ones that can front the cost of such an upgrade.

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Luiz Abdala
Trollface

Put a fake birthday on facebook.

My mother in law placed a fake birthday on her FB, so she knows who is sending Birthday cards but barely knows her, and who is actual family that knows her actual birthday. The woman is a genius.

My wife did the same, I find it hilarious.

Datacenter architect creates bonkers designs to illustrate the craft, and quirks, of building bit barns

Luiz Abdala
Meh

The servers can be anywhere...

...But the people that handle them directly can't. They have to live somewhere near Civilization, and commute to said datacenter.

Now, on another topic... I heard that somewhere like Canada or whatever had the bottom of the lakes nearby at 4C temperature, year-around. Yes, someone put water pipes in there and pumped it up to cool a datacenter, zero costs in refrigerating all that water. Was it the great lakes? In Australia you are not getting that. So, the alternative...

As for solar panels, you'd need an absurd amount of panels and BATTERIES for any sizable datacenter. And you don't want Lithium jobbies, you want sodium-sulfur or newer type ones with nearly the same energy density but are infinitely cheaper, they can handle also the cooling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

Luiz Abdala
Facepalm

How do you attach the detumbler to something that is already tumbling?

That question was left unanswered... If the debris is already spinning at a signifcant pace, how do you hook it up?

As preventive measure on new satellites, sure. But if the proverbial turd is already spinning after hitting the fan, how do you stop that?

I'm reading the article again in case I missed the explanation.

(...)

Ok, so this thing prevents tumbling. But there's no way to fix it nicely, once it gets out of control, then. Alright. One problem at a time.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Luiz Abdala
Windows

Why would ads in regular pages allow any sort of script?

As I understand, those are the actual security hazard. Only allow ads made of JPEGs like it's 2001 again and we are good to go. (The ignorant Windows user logo relays that I have some idea that's not so easy to fix.)

Now, how can YT pickup that you downloaded their code, but the interpreter on our side deleted some chunks off it? Privacy indeed. It still spends some bandwidth, but ignoring that, there should be no way for them to sniff it out. From their point of view, I perused the entire content of that page that carried the video I wanted to watch.

TLDR; make our browsers lie they displayed the whole thing with full ads to us if youtube scans them...

UK throws millions at scheme to heat homes with waste energy from datacenters

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Way ahead of you.

I heated my room last winter playing GTA online.

May I recommend a watercooler AIO with exhaust fans on the front, like my rig, for maximum efficiency.

Like other people said, I owned the infrastructure, so... no need of pipe laying or the sort, either.

Israel and Italy have cheapest mobile data out of 237 countries

Luiz Abdala
FAIL

Brazil was one of the most expensive ones, until...

Free market. No monopoly. 4 competitors were set, and the race to the bottom happened.

Landlines were so expensive in my youth that they were included in the deed of the property, at a substantial price. The mobile, when became commercial, followed suit.

US, of all places, has no free market, apparently.

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Luiz Abdala
Trollface

Buy a full nuclear PWR then.

A full-blown PWR has about 1200MW. Just buy one and sell the extra power to the grid.

And that could happen anywhere around the planet where you can buy and sell energy, and because it is Microsoft, that can run their servers anywhere in the planet as well.

Or, I don't know, build a 1200 MW server farm and slap a power plant right next to it, in a Country that doesn't mind nuclear power.

No microreactor thing, think big already.

The home Wi-Fi upgrade we never asked for is coming. The one we need is not

Luiz Abdala
FAIL

ISP router wifi is a mistake.

ISP router? That thing that had the wifi name and password stickered to the bottom of the unit? That any former disgruntled employee could have collected and do whatever he can?

Hard pass.

Sometimes, I may open a DMZ setting on my router to access some feature directly, but most of the time, the ISP wifi is no man's land for me.

Luiz Abdala
Windows

I come from the gaming community, and I say:

"There is no wireless in the planet that can replace a stable, low ping Cat 5 under the carpet, when it comes down to headshots".

Now, really, some games are uber-sensitive to channel hopping these wireless devices are prone to doing.

Some will drop you out of the game completely, some will lag you out, some will LITERALLY crash the game.

If you can get wired, DO IT. It doesn't matter how good the wireless is, a cable will best it, eleven out of ten times.

I don't care how deep are you into Wifi specs, as a home user, a cable will best a wireless, every time. Even the crappiest, scratched, nailed on ethernet cable will trump a wireless connection.

And even when you DO find a neat wireless, it will suck 2 amps out of the wall, and probably burn red while you do it, or all the time.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

Luiz Abdala
Joke

Re: don't forget - 2CV spark-plugs and *proper* BMWs

This gentleman could not fix his 2CV in when it broke down in Saharan Morocco, but he built a motorcycle out of the parts. I guess he missed the hammer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Leray

Luiz Abdala
Boffin

If I recall, one French gentleman didn't have those tools, but he built a motorcycle out of the parts he COULD fix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile_Leray

Luiz Abdala
Pirate

Rewiring...

That's why they want to put everything in the computer screen on the dash, so you can't rewire the switch around it. Bastards.

But then, jailbraking is a thing already.

Unity closes offices, cancels town hall after threat in wake of runtime fee restructure

Luiz Abdala
Pint

Re: If reloads were charged in Battlefield...

That deserves several pints. Now those pint reloads are fair usage of currency.

Luiz Abdala
Joke

If reloads were charged in Battlefield...

...players would be engaging in bayonet charges.

Only snipers would be left using bullets for one month, tops, until they run out.

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