Posts by Luiz Abdala

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg...

... but if we all upgrade to windows 11 it goes to 33kg.

NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

In another 50 years...

... I hope mankind reaches a dilemma:

- Do we swing by Voyager 1 using our first FTL drive, pick it up and put it in a museum;

- Give it an overhaul and put it exactly where it was retrieved and let it continue its mission;

- Let it die as is...

The 12 KB that Windows just can't seem to quit

Re: Coconut Team Fortress 2 moment.

Addendum:

- Yes it is a game.

- The file is encoded inside a texture pack and is labeled coconut.vtf, and you'd need a interpreter to find and open it, since it is encoded inside game assets. There is no hidden steganography on it.

- Technically the game doesn't need it to run, but Steam will run checksum and file integrity checks before running ANY game, so again, technically, you need it just to pass file verification tools. Should you delete it and run Steam's integrity check, it will download the file again, just to match the registered files upon version checking the game.

- The whole thing is a joke, but a solid foundation one. I wish more software kept checksums and failsafe tools available for when you try to run them in a corrupted state. Steam is commendable on that account.

A little unwarranted research explains the myth.

Coconut Team Fortress 2 moment.

There is a picture of a coconut (coconut.jpg) on the TF2 install files. Remove it and the game crashes or doesn't install. It is just a 256 x 256 bitmap, but it doesn't work without it.

There is no explanation why.

Open Document Format turns 20, but Microsoft Office still reigns supreme

No, I bought it from a stand where it had the Office logo copied in black and white on a piece of paper inside a clear plastic envelope, with a Dr. Hank CD-R media inside, and the serial number written on the back of that piece of paper with a felt pen, and also the same serial written on the CD-R itself.

Later they added a serial.txt to the CD itself, but that was years after the first versions.

Assassin's Creed maker faces GDPR complaint for forcing single-player gamers online

It's not even for authentication or DRM purposes.

The most damning are the games that claim DRM purposes / authentication, when in fact a one-time call upon installation suffices.

Such was true, that some of those could turn to a one-time auth at setup, and never call home again, and did so.

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

Loved that lift.

I want a lift equipped with a disposal device now...

How to stay on Windows 10 instead of installing Linux

El Reg knocked out of the park on this one.

That was beautiful, I want that one. Take my money.

The time-bombed versions are here, though... for the Brazilian version.

https://www.microsoft.com/pt-br/evalcenter/download-windows-10-enterprise

Windows 11 stops freaking out over wallpaper customization

I miss AcdSee... and apps that worked DESPITE Windows.

I miss that tiny app that would take your picture, and add a calendar to it. No widget taking memory, just a 200kB JPEG (back then) rewritten everyday with a calendar added to it. The whole app took 50kB or something. Of course you could rotate the picture in the desktop every x hours, something Windows itself would eventually do. And stop doing.

And Wallpaper Engine is very good at putting VIDEOS as desktop wallpapers. You can throw your own videos at it, or it will animate a lake effect over a marked surface of water on your choice of picture, and´put it in a MPEG file that can be looped.

This app will tax your graphics cards, but otherwise it is mostly harmless, never had an issued with it.

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Homer in the bar...

I haven't seen Homer in a bar surrounded by Ghibli style characters...

[0.003 seconds on google..]

Aaaaand there it is...

https://www.reddit.com/r/simpsonsshitposting/comments/1jmickx/this_ghibli_ai_on_socials_disgust_me/

I think it is wrong. It should pay to Ghibli studios for. every. single. image.

This one is ok though, made still in Simpson style (the image can be update at any moment, hence a description of what I saw):

https://imgflip.com/tag/homer+bar?sort=latest

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

9 track tape?

I'm just happy the Government DOES backups of stuff, and that they work (or at least they should).

Now, if they should be using LTO 9 or newer (they should) and some near-online caching on newer media (probably a good idea) I'd leave to the experts, not DOGE.

As long it isn't on reel-to-reel 9 track tapes anymore, I'm ok.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

No wind to spread dust.

One thing that bothers solar panels heavily on this planet is the wind picking dust up and covering them*. Even if they are less efficient being made from moon stuff, let's say that real estate and dust will be no issue.

*No really, I read about some LARGE solar projects that were ruined because the panels needed dusting. Several square kilometers of panels that could not be watered or dusted in any automated fashion. Not to mention the panels were not at human reach heights; ladders or access to said panels for manual dusting labor was also unfeasible.

Windows 11 adds auto-recovery, kills offline setup loophole

Re: start ms-cxh:localonly

I was looking for that one.

Adding an email you are basically putting your PC in an MS Domain. Instead you want to login in your own domain, which would be nice to use the same login in any machine in my house in a centralized way.

This is brilliant.

Re: Meh

I created one fake Hotmail account to allow Dirt 2 to save local progress (Windows games, remember that crud?) with the zip code of Manhattan, so it would be "supported".

I still have that around somewhere.

Re: start ms-cxh:localonly

Apparently that original workaround still works if you add this, before that link you posted goes down:

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /fshutdown /r /t 0

Microsoft to mark five decades of Ctrl-Alt-Deleting the competition

Re: Windows 7 rose to the level

I had the unpleasant opportunity of trying windows Mistake Edition on an acquaitance... yes it was a dumpster fire.

It was stripped of all the managing tools that could be leveraged from DOS, while importing no managing features from Windows 2000, or not telling users what tools were available from NT or something. At least a tool translating directly a line like "format c:" to "fdisk"... nope.

It was a disaster.

That particular PC had a virus/malware and I had no recourse but to UNPARTITION the thing and install the OEM version that came with it on CD/DVD, if I recall correctly.

And yeah, Windows 10 is an OK OS, if MS was not trying so hard to shove ads and bloatware on it...

Nvidia GPU roadmap confirms it: Moore’s Law is dead and buried

Re: Not Enough Compute Speed?

I just remembered some scientist that made a faster algorithm to compute Pi, when it was done by hand... for some reason.

Pascal, right?

Re: a datacenter is a gigawatt

Just a note here: nuclear reactors don't work well with variable loads. Gas turbines maybe can be clicked on or off at will, but not chemically balanced nuclear reactors*... Even hidropower turbines take half an hour to turn on and off.

Nuclear reactors take 2 days to turn on and full seven to turn off.

Which means these guys will need a hell of a bank of fast capacitors and batteries, or means to dump the load, as in, a city grid connection will be mandatory, and make said grid operators turn an angry eye at them for the transients.

*The fine controls of a PWR rely on boron dissolved in water to control the neutron absorption instead of control rods; those work more as a brute force emergency braking system.

Even Google struggles to balance fast-but-pricey flash and cheap-but-slow hard disks

Isn't that the point of ZFS?

I'm gonna admit complete ignorance here but... wasn't ZFS designed for this?

(If there is someone that can actually reach a Zettabyte of data to manage, it's Google.)

Another thing: can't they just let an AI figure the tiers out? Enough data for training, they sure do have. If the usage patterns don't help an exact algorithm to manage the tiers, perhaps an AI can do that?

I get it, these guys are handling something that would boggle my mind, but still...

I am confused and humbled by what I don't understand, honestly.

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Polling vs Interrupted keyboards.

One of the reasons to keep a PS/2 port around is for interrupted signalling, something USB can't do. USB needs to do polling, be it 200Hz, 500Hz... so they invented a way for USB to do interrupts too, via software, so no keyboard gets any perceived lag.

Another is keyboard rollover or NKRO: you can press as many keys at once you want, the system will get them all with ps2 signalling. USB keyboards had to add smarts to allow NKRO.

A third reason are BIOSes that don't support usb keyboards... but these are vintage now.

So, if you got a ps2 port and means to use it, slap the keyboard on it. Otherwise, any difference is merely academical.

Mice never had that problem, because they were already built after USB.

Microsoft patches patch that broke USB printing in Windows 11

In Microsoft's defense...

HP printers were used to print a single smiley face, then spit the sheet out, then do it again on the next sheet, ever since imemmorial time.

The first model I had was a B/W one, Deskjet 520, adorably beige frame and it could ruin a whole stack of 50 A4 sheets in under 10 minutes. It was pretty fast when it came to ruining your supplies.

This was... in 1994, dear lord. 31 years of CRAPPINESS by HP.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Don't forget Outlook Express.

Outlook Express was surprisingly stable and fast, reading POP3 and newsgroups with ease. Seriously.I only remember fondly of it. For ages it came with Internet Explorer and just worked (tm).

Outlook 97 full had the damned PST files that grew over 2GB and froze, because nobody tolerated the 10MB limit of Exchange and every file was shared as an email attachment. Very few people used more than one machine, so that worked to empty your claustrophobic allocation on the server.

LA deputies dogged by New Year date glitch in patrol car PCs

Y2K25 ?

Oh c'mon, nobody thought of y2k but the former chief?

Altough to be honest, I have a wifi 802.11 N router that also looped around in 2020 but it still works fine.

HP Inc settles printer toner lockout lawsuit with a promise to make firmware updates optional

HP printers can die a horrible death by baseball bat for all that I care.

Printer Ink is cents on the liter, cents on the pint, whatever units you use.

I use Epson Ecotank printers (tm) that use VIALS of ink, it has no cartridge whatsoever. No chip. Just a pint of ink that you squeeze in the tank.

HP printers have been horrible for nearly 30 years by now.

NASA's inbox goes orbital after email mishap spams entire space industry

Who, me?

That would be a great "Who, me?" moment.

"How I got to spam the whole MAPTIS base by accident and keep my job".

Coming from the type of people that put a man on the moon before putting wheels on a suitcase, I'm not surprised. Amused, yes.

BOFH: Have you tried forcing an unexpected reboot?

Nvidia video drivers update are the scariest of them all, after a BIOS update.

The thing begins the update, then the screen goes blank. Without warning. With a progress bar rolling on the screen normally when it happens.

Then you hold your breath, and won't let go until the screen shows up again.

Then it skips straight to 100%, whatever percentage was there, it updates to 100% LITERALLY off-screen, er the screen was turned off.

Dell discloses monster 20-petaFLOPS desktop built on Nvidia's GB300 Superchip

Did Dell even try to follow ATX standards this time?

I am more interested if they follow ATX , BTX, EATX, or any standards inside their PC/workstations/rack mounted gear at all.

The amount of people complaining they couldn't upgrade their Alienware PC is staggering, mainly because:

- The case mounts and the motherboard don't follow ATX standards, so you can't reuse the case for a new motherboard;

- The power supply is some form of butchered server power supply so the case has no room for a conventional one, only one that is from Dell;

- The motherboard simply isn't square and the USB ports protrude through a cutout on the case or some equally bizarre design choice, so you can't even put it on a conventional case;

- The giant case has so much unusable space taken by aesthetic bezels that you can't even put a conventional GPU inside it, and the case falls apart if you remove them (so they were structural after all);

- The system runs at heliospherical temperatures because they didn't even bother with airflow or even slapping an AIO cooler inside, even a tiny 120mm one, something youtubers managed without barbaric tools and improved the aging machine temperatures immediately.

Yeah, I wouldn't buy a workstation from Dell, by any metric. Supermicro would provide a better system overall... just saying...

We heard you like HBM – Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra GPUs will have 288 GB of it

Are these even GPUs anymore?

At this point, can we still call them GPUs? Can you throw a game at them, and they will happily run it? Do these even have graphical processing in any capacity? Here goes the old dad joke: can they run Crisis?

Should we call them Parallel Computing Unit? PCU? Because they are not intended for graphical loads or CAD anymore, they are being built purely for AI loads that happen to have a lot of parallel computing nodes as requirement...?

And 288GB of RAM, that's hardly even necessary for even the most demanding ray-tracing demanding job in any area, but a drop in the ocean for AI (for example)...?

We just call them GPUs for lack of a proper name, because they are not CPUs, they are not central to anything, they don't run the OS, they don't interconnect or manage any parts of the machine, quite the opposite, the entire system has to be built to feed them with data and to be useful at any capacity.

Joke icon because I am deliberately ignoring the advancements announced in the article. And because Nvidia is making a joke of their original customers - gamers - providing their latest gaming gpus with just 24GB of RAM or something and charging through the nose for the privilege of owning a product from them, given the virtual monopoly of the market they hold.

Amazon to kill off local Alexa processing, all voice requests shipped to the cloud

I feel old...

Just yesterday I was installing IBM Via Voice on my Pentium 100 Windows 98 desktop... and trying to train the voice recog on that...

User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse

Using white paint to correct typos is still worse.

I mean, trying to use the glasses case as a mouse is passable until you look at it, and realize the mouse isn't there.

But actively expecing it to work as a mouse or smearing your monitor with white fluid, if you haven't slept over for the last 40 years like Captain America,... no.

Need cash? Your IPv4 stash can now be collateral for $100M loans

Isn't GM one of them? Imagine if a car is on the dumpster *right now* with a valid ipv4 address on the onstar thingie, just waiting to be recycled.

Apple has locked me in the same monopolistic cage Microsoft's built for Windows 10 users

I was hoping for...

..a hackintosh with dual-boot shennanigans afoot when I read the title of the article. Just like when Windows borks completely any Linux dual boot MBR (or UEFI booting order, or whatever kids call it these days) if ANY upgrade even remotely tries to happen for the Windows partition as it crunches the boot for any other operating system. Someone doing old school dual boot, not a VM or anything.

I felt a bit disappointed to be honest, and surprised, that even a full Apple environment left you with a sour taste.

Eh, such is life.

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

I chose Amazon FireTV instead...

because when we wanted our own device, there were no other options available. The Amazon product is pretty self-reliant to connect to a wifi network and to decode any streams, and you can interface to it with its own remote and your TV. Pretty straightforward.

We learned about smart products with Chromecast, worst of all. No problems so far, either.

Developer sabotaged ex-employer with kill switch activated when he was let go

He doesn't read BOFH, does he?

He did it on a machine with his own credentials, and he was the only one that had access to it. And wrote the code on his own login.

Non-BOFH conformity all around.

======

Yeah, jail time. Appropriate.

More Voyager instruments shut down to eke out power supplies

I wonder which shutdown sequence is better...

So, do they keep running the most important sensors that happens to be the most power hungry, or the most irrelevant but lowest power sensor, that will ensure the best longevity?

I wonder how they weight it down and decide the shutdown sequence.

==================

On the other hand, I was hoping for a Voyager 6 and a wormhole / blackhole...

Dark mode might be burning more juice than you think

El Reg Dark Mode

Opera GX tramples over those settings and puts a lot of sites on Dark Mode, to be confirmed with Vulture Central. However, things that should contrast with the white background by being black will disappear or become nearly invisible, so YMMV for some elements. Some elements happen to become dark mode through chrome extensions, and that's another mud pit.

Tvtropes.org has dark mode settings front and right panel, on any page. They also add wide mode for those with ultrawide monitors that like long sentences.

CGA era.

I never felt the urge to crank the brightness on any monitor ever since the amber era. It would smear the CRT picture.

The evils of white backgrounds became evident on the first time we booted Windows 3.11, so we avoid that ever since.

These days, games and photoshops demand monitor calibration, and those demand brightness and contrast to remain stable.

Plus my mobile guzzles through the battery on high brightness.

Einstein Probe finds two stars that have spent 40 million years taking turns eating each other

Re: Disappointment

Let's just say we need to be at the exact distance where we can see things going klabooie and not be taken out by them.

I heard about some stars that emit a lethal jet of radiation through their poles when they go boom, and these were calculated to be lethal for over 1 million LY in the direction they happen to aim.

Like being in the city of Halifax when a ship carrying 7000 tons of explosives caught fire resulting from a collision and blew up. The city became a center for eye injuries, given the amount of people looking at the ship's immolation behind glass windows when it detonated, and where within range.

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

So yeah, it is a bit comforting not being inside the blast radius of the space wedgie* of the week.

*Star Trek reference.

NAND flash prices plunge amid supply glut, factory output cut

Price cut? Yes please.

I could use a price cut and buy another TB or two in NVME drives... if I got the slots in my motherboard...

Maybe I can install more games and retire my aging spinning rusties still carrying my music folder, before they expire.

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

As long it doesn't hijack keyboard shortcuts like Teams...

Ctrl-1 should format a cell in Excel, and not what Teams does.

Ctrl-F should find a string in Excel, not what Teams does.

Whatever you come up with, don't do it like Teams does.

Nobody should do what Teams does.

Teams shouldn't do what Teams does.

Teams DOESN'T team up with the rest of Office tools. You need a local license to run the proper keyboard shortcuts, WHY OH HEAVENS, WHY???

Teams doesn't integrate with Explorer, and won't let me CHOOSE the download folder, it will dump the file on the default download folder and make me go get it and move the file to the proper place.

Why is Teams so janky? Who coded this crap?

I think even GOD DAMN BLOODY DISCORD is more compatible with Windows than Teams.

London has 400 GW of grid requests holding up datacenter builds

Supressed demand?

So, yeah, you need to pull 400GW out of your pants to supply everybody. Bit barns don't care where they are located, as long as they have the power. You can put them on the most unsavory of places too.

Let's see:

- You need to produce a hell lot of power, year-around.

- Production and consumption can still be located anywhere.

-The consumer has no ecological concerns whatsoever, so the production doen't need it either.

Nuclear plants check all boxes. The newer design ones can generate more maneageable waste than ever. It doesn't even need to be in anybody's backyard, regardless it pollutes or not.

Just put both in places nobody needs to go.

Does this thing run on a 220 V power supply? Oh. That puff of smoke suggests not

Multiple voltages.

Back then, it was hard to find devices that took multiple voltages. If anybody today releases a device with that dinky cursed voltage switch in the back that needs a screwdriver, it deserves to burn in a 220V plug.

HOWEVER, I remember mum had a GE vaccuum cleaner. Blue finish all around, 110V jobbie. Our home had 220V plugs, and mum had a ginourmous 20 pounds of a brick of a transformer on a tiny dish with wheels, that could take the 1200 watts of the vaccum device.

Guess what the maid did... she fumbled the transformer wires and plugged it directly, the transformer went unused. It spun at twice the speed for 15 seconds, yours truly noticed, and flew towards the circuit breakers and unplugged the mains for the whole house. Being aged 10 back then, I already knew how the mains worked for undisclosed reasons...

The General Electric device took the voltage well, didn't even smell that hard, and still worked perfectly. Oh yes, it was duly overbuilt.

I would be surprised if your telly, your gadgets, and your PC power supply are not 80-250V and 50/60Hz devices these days.

Why users still couldn't care less about Windows 11

Re: Why change?

MS tried to pull the microsoft email login once, instead of a local domain, on one of these ill-fated W10 updates.

W11 is next to impossible to use local domain logins, you have to physically unplug the PC on setup or worse.

One more reason to stay behind.

Re: They said Windows 10 would be the last Windows. No further "Windowses" would exist.

(PS) I know Jerry Nixon said this, not being a PR for Microsoft, but still.

Preemptive self-correction.

They said Windows 10 would be the last Windows. No further "Windowses" would exist.

It still is, to me.

Again, if MS gives me a budget to buy new compatible hardware, I will gladly upgrade.

Only when Steam stops being compatible, I will think of it.

Call of Duty studio co-founder pleads guilty to crashing drone into firefighting aircraft

Ironically...

... the firefighters themselves could be using a drone to map the most critical spots for fires, maybe even relay temperature readings or atmospheric composition, wind patterns, and a host of other intel that would cost much more to gather with manned aircraft.

Ubuntu upgrade had our old Nvidia GPU begging for a downgrade

Live CD?

Isn't a live CD option possible? Try the new kernel from a USB stick, see that it borks your GPU drivers and offers no other drivers, simply reboot without stick.

Isn't that the whole idea of "Try it before you buy it"?

I'm confused.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Friday night trek was futile...

I see what you did there.

That PC was borged, didn't live long, but he prospered.

Mine has a red shirt with one pin with it...

OpenZFS 2.3 is here, with RAID expansion and faster dedup

Re: Steam?

Exactly what I was looking for. Nailed it. Will study the setup later...

BOFH: How to innosplain your way through an audit

The ol'reliable mechanical delete button.

Mine has a crowbar accross the back.