* Posts by Luiz Abdala

737 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jul 2007

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Blustering Blackbeard's PC was all at sea, sysadmin got him shipshape in seconds

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Coat

Brightness knob on IBM...

The brightness knob of an IBM monitor fooled my peers, more than once.

Remember ambar/green monitors? They had no light indicators whatsoever.

If I recall correctly, some were turned on/off on the exactly same knob to avoid this.

I'm showing my age...

Smart mirror shows dumb Windows in elevator

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Angel

Re: In my apartment building, the elevator ads run on Linux.

Considering the condo I live in consists of 6 towers, 18 lifts, 10 access points, takes an entire city block and 10 minutes to walk through it, I call it a win in efficiency.

Yes, the A4 comparison remains true, but a single employee updates the whole thing in seconds. YMMV.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Linux

In my apartment building, the elevator ads run on Linux.

I could see them updating and rebooting it in real time, taking the time I went from the 17th floor to the lobby without stops.

It loads not just ads, but also building policy, like hours to take the trash, expected pets' owners' actions, and common areas schedule, such as volleyball court area and BBQ area usage.

It is actually useful and informative, all things considered, and the ads pay for it. The ad company was very smart on what it does and offers: while offering a genuine service, it gets paid by the ads it runs.

I never saw it crash.

Retro tech fan views LaserDisc movie data with a budget microscope

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Re: I wonder how much data could you compress on a Laserdisc-sized blu-ray.

And you already gave it a name. Perfection.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

I wonder how much data could you compress on a Laserdisc-sized blu-ray.

A format made completely for enthusiasts, like the having the whole marathon of Star Trek, Star Wars, into a single disc, or at least 3 movies at once, or maybe a 4k or 8k version of each but again for enthusiasts of physical media only, not a single stream in sight.

The analog part of the Laserdisc is of course disregarded for this in favor of digital encoding.

'Hundreds' of Iranian hacking attempts have hit surveillance cameras since the missile strikes

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Joke

Let´s not forget...

... Schlock's Mercenary approach to hacking a camera: showing a QR code to the camera lens itself to force it to go into sleep mode.

That would be an hilarious vulnerability.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2010-05-02

Users fume at Outlook.com email 'carnage'

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Joke

The day I made a Hotmail...

...it had spam, before I told anyone I had a new email address. I hadn't typed that address anywhere, but it already had spam in it.

Before whitelists, blacklists, rules, integration with Exchange (or becoming Exchange?) and even before being POP3 (imap? whatever) addressable so you could actually use Outlook Express to read it, it had spam on the inbox, and had no spam folder.

Blocking stuff before being in any rule, 30 years later, is somehow not surprising.

Nvidia superchip infusion finally coming to Windows PCs, report says

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Joke

All that kerfuffle to end up with a gaming notebook on your hands. Again.

"Similar performance to a RTX 5070" - even this metric is here. I didn't say it, they did.

"140 watts" again. A powerful leg warmer at that. Good luck running this thing on batteries ALONE.

Just daring to run AI will make it an excellent gaming machine, even when you don't want or need it.

So when clippypilot is not suggesting to rewrite your essays (running 365 out of your browser, of all things), you can actually unwind and take Lara Croft through one more god-forsaken jungle or whatever.

These notebooks will once again be thrown on the pile of leccy guzzler behemoth models that has been stacking for the last 20 years or so.

Just for the gimmick of AI.

Work experience kids messed with manager's PC to send him to Ctrl-Alt-Del hell

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Thumb Up

HD intel graphics that had this trick, IIRC.

It came up to be actually useful exactly once when we had to setup a lab and there was no room to place a monitor near a machine... which someone made a rack specifically to hold the monitor stand upside down, VESA bolt plates out of budget.

Penguin in your pocket: Nexphone dual boots into Linux, Windows 11

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
WTF?

Re: "...run Linux and boot into Windows 11"...

I am very confused by that sentence alone, because Windows loves to nuke non-windows partitions ON SIGHT.

How one developer used Claude to build a memory-safe extension of C

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

Microslop eliminated C and C++ alright, and replaced it with bork.

(...) Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Microsoft engineer Galen Hunt last month said, "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030. Our strategy is to combine AI and algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases." (...)

I guess the rest of the news confirms they are committing to this. They bought truckloads of shotguns and ammo and their AI is shooting on everybody's feet, including their own.

Every Bork Tuesday they dig their own grave a little deeper.

I don't think they will survive to 2030.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS. Just to stay on topic, I hope that the trapC project works just fine. Having "guidelines" for memory management is a good thing, right?

Microsoft illegally installed cookies on schoolkid's tech, data protection ruling finds

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
FAIL

Default On.

It's kinda hard to turn OFF something that is turned ON by default to everybody, right?

Marketing 'genius' destroyed a printer by trying to fix a paper jam

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Re: During COVID (Laserjet 5's)

Laserjet 5's where one of the reasons the clip-on tie was invented, they could choke less sturdy blokes.

And it had actual steel gears, with enough traction for a RC toy or a school project conveyor belt system.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Devil

To be honest...

...some printers deserve the treatment that would get the Geneva Convention and Human Rights suing you for War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity if you applied it to anything alive, let alone sentient.

Notepad will now tell you all the ways Microsoft has enshittified it

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Coat

Everything I ever wanted out of Notepad can be found on Notepad++

code tagging and paragraphing, hexadecimal tinkering...

Either that or it runs out of a raw prompt.

I was hoping for those "innovations".

Microsoft admits Outlook might freeze when saving files to OneDrive

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

PST files were a disaster on their own since the last epoch.

Ever since PST files were limited to 2GB they were a liability.

I'm surprised they work under dropbox or onedrive AT ALL.

Not having your emails online somewhere and having a local copy is fantastic, but the moment you put something that should be on a LOCAL storage to be placed on a network, funky stuff starts to happen. 20 years of cruft on the whole exchange/outlook architecture might have something to do with it, perhaps, by chance? Not designed for purpose being the rest of the problem?

Concorde at 50: Twice the speed of sound, twice the economic trouble

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Unhappy

Not even a NASA exemplar?

There was a certain astronomical event - an eclipse - that could only be observed for long enough on an aircraft that combined raw top speed and the necessary long range autonomy to reach the corner of the planet under said event, (with a window measured in SECONDS) and a Concorde was recruited exactly for that purpose, on a frame that was declassified and liberated for civilian use.

The Concorde 001 (F-WTSS) should have been kept *off* the Museums just for that capability. Of course it is in the Musée de l'air et de l'espace in France now.

But damn if NASA isn't fond of collecting exotic airframes with even more exotic capabilities, like the SR71 itself.

Yeah, economical viability is a foregone conclusion, but keeping an airframe airworthy just for the capability, even THAT was expensive? This is sad.

Windows 11 shutdown bug forces Microsoft into out-of-band damage control

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Coat

Re: Not even "shutdown -s -f -t 0?"

By the way, I need a cat-proof cover for my power button on top of the case...

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
FAIL

Not even "shutdown -s -f -t 0?"

I thought that command ran into ring 0 or -2...

I guess I prefer a CLUNK of a circuit breaker or the UPS hard mechanical lever, if anyone still got those.

Manchester ATM ups PIN requirement to full Windows login

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Angel

Re: Not the only OS in town...

1. OS2 Warp, wow that's rare. Security by obscurity is strong with this one.

2. Machines that take your credit card COMPLETELY out of your hands were banned from Brazil very quickly, reasons unknown. Back in the 80's they were very common. I guess it was easier for fraudsters to force the ATM to hold your CC hostage for their advantage. They use the half-input these days, just enough to read the onboard chip, while still allowing the owner to forcibly yank it off for any reason.

Royal Navy's helicopter drone makes its first autonomous flight

Luiz Abdala Silver badge

Re: Unmanned take-off/landing on ships?

On another video, a new type of autopilot installed on a F18 tried to chase a refuelling basket drogue, weaving up and down with it. The pilot got seasick really quickly hahah. Guess they didn't try that again for several years.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Angel

Re: Unmanned take-off/landing on ships?

I have seen a video of a meatbag-operated helicopter being ANCHORED to a ship in 10-foot waves while pitching 30 degrees, and it was the most awe-inspiring thing I have ever seen in a while. Inches from disaster at every second, and both the ship's crews were ON THEIR TOES to make it happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0s4pKEOu6E

I wonder how much stress is being removed from the equation for every part involved when the bird has a computer brain.

BOFH: Every computer system eventually serves ads

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Joke

On the same page of the BOFH...

"Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors"

This has to be comedic timing from Simon ahahaha

Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Re: Too bad

Old Windows games, like Road Rash and Fury3 (Fury cube) made Windows DLL calls (the save file dialog, specifically) and they don't work on newer windows just because of that. Good point.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Windows taking L pills with Wine.

The Linux boys are improving day by day, while the Windows boys are failling left and right.

Gaming has SteamOS, Wine looks very capable, and I am running out of reasons to even consider a Windows 11 setup. If I have to abandon my Windows 10, I am so jumping into the Wine tanker. As long as gaming works (GTA and the sort are known for being ill-tempered with kernel anti-cheat tools) I will gladly abandon the nonsense Windows has become.

Price, battery life, performance – that's how you sell PCs

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Go

Re: I wonder if the problem is nothing to do with the spec of the computer

As a gamer, I require the fattest hardware that I can service myself, ruling notebooks straight out. Old school full ATX cases. They are glass aquariums these days, but the thumb rule is still ATX, ITX if you are feeling bold and want it to be luggable.

And notebooks that are remotely adequate for gaming, are either power hungry, overheating gremlins, or must be tethered to a power socket to unleash the full multipliers, or all of the above. Regardless, they are a chore to fix if something goes wrong. Yes, they still are constrained, 20 years out of the idea.

Trump administration sets GPU export rules that put Chinese buyers at the back of the queue

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
WTF?

I'm confused on how...

...will America ban anything being exported from Taiwan or South Korea to China. Aren't the the chip fabs all over there?

[reads on Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR)]

...nevermind.

Developer writes script to throw AI out of Windows

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
FAIL

I miss when the FIND DOCUMENT feature was a DIR command.

You could even throw DOS wildcards at it (like *.doc) and it would scurry your drives after it, NOT THE INTERNET. If you program the old Find back, I will drink to it.

Now it s a freaking AI that doesn't find jacksquat of my files and I want it gone.

The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Facepalm

Don't forget South Korea.

The other place on the planet that makes advanced silicon chips, sitting right next to a liability.

Apple blocks dev from all accounts after he tries to redeem bad gift card

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Joke

And Microsoft wants to lock my PC down with a Windows 11 login???

Really???

No, seriously???

Imagine If I try to redeem a bogus Xbox gift card, this happens? I am locked out of my PC? My Teams? My work relies on a Outlook account, and Teams. They all get locked out together?

And Microsoft wishes that on everyone?

Joke icon, but is it?

The future of long-term data storage is clear and will last 14 billion years

Luiz Abdala Silver badge

Schlock Mercenary treats this topic...

The folks at the comic found a Moon. It had engraved patterns across the whole surface. Zooming in, showed more patterns all the way up to the atomic scale.

The pattern had a binary logic to it. It was data.

An entire planet was used to store information, and we were the aliens bumping into it.

Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Vehicular MP3 player.

I solved my problem with a FM injector that reads USB dongles years later. Slap a 64GB flash drive in it with 10.000 songs, never have to touch it again.

But the tinkering earns respect.

Space-power startup claims it can beam energy to solar farms

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

Archimedes with extra steps.

Humanity has been trying to do that - beaming energy - for... 2200 years give or take.

Please keep trying. Some day it will work, the kinks will be ironed out eventually. Like using microwave to bypass water droplets, but then, feeding solar panels directly as a net positive...

Mythbusters aside, you need some active targeting on the mirrors, and they need to be trainable (I guess they did it here?). Another thing are lenses. You can concentrate the power in a narrow beam, and limit the frequency, the whole point of a laser, to make the beam as coherent as possible and avoid scattering (just a train of thought here, please disregard).

Please continue the research.

De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Windows

I am quite happy with the Windows 95 paradigm.

I don't care there are 23 flavors of desktop, that every linux distro had to make their own. There is no standard, but everybody knows what it must look like, how it must work and that's the actual standard, altough how you do them is up to you. They must have a launcher, a status bar, all the thing mentioned in the article.

But standards... they work for hardware. USB killed a bunch of interfaces, except for things that don't accept multiplexing, maybe. Some of them still exist virtually inside USB, like serial (no really, some gear still use 2400 baud 8N1 com1 serial lingo wrapped inside a usb carapace.)

HDMI wrapped video and audio together in a fashion that Holywood took no objection. I am still amazed I can potentially connect a 40 inch TV on my pc and get audio on it, because my GPU has a pass-through for HDMI. Not that single-cable is an HDMI novelty, and SCART existed long before that.

PCs themselves only exist because everybody agreed on standards, like ATX. (Dell disagrees.) The fact you can buy one piece of hardware from each vendor and everything works is nothing short of a miracle.

Techie ran up $40,000 bill trying to download a driver

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Facepalm

I totally relate to that.

Back in the day, I had to make long distance calls to get internet, and left my whole paycheck of 15 days with the phone company.

The first ISP that offered long-range Wi-Fi with UHF antennas and literal springles' can would cost me another paycheck, but it was worth it, never again I had a phone bill like that.

(TLDR, that ISP was tinkering with WiFi range, and we managed 3 miles with 256 kbps in 802.11b, worth it.)

The sweetest slice of Pi: Raspberry Pi 500+ sports mechanical keys, 16GB, and built-in SSD

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Full Circle.

The first computer I ever touched relied on a CRT TV, and it was mounted under a (horrible) keyboard.

Several ages later, it had the same format under-the-keyboard once again, but with a ton of functionality on top.

Just because some ideas are old don't mean they suck, it was just the technology of the day.

I loved this.

Google unmasks itself as mystery hyperscaler behind yet another UK datacenter

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Can Google build...

...a full blown, WANO-regulated, 4000 thermal Megawatts PWR? If Microsoft can fire Three Mile Island up again, can Google own a Nuclear Power Plant?

It's not like they need to use the whole 1.2 GW such a plant produces, but they can sell it back to the grid. A clean, stable power source that works continuously for 18 months at a time, that doesn't rely on wind or sun, that no power company in the planet would refuse to have as provider.

How does the permits work for such a thing? How does Microsoft get permission to buy the whole power of TMI? I know it should be easier because the planet already existed and had all the permits to exist in the first place, but how hard it is to a company fund and have the permits to use the power of a plant, even though they can't touch any glowing bits inside?

Starlink outage knocks tens of thousands offline worldwide

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

It took a geomagnetic event to take it down?

It's beats our usual ISP blunders where the cleaning lady yanks the UPS off the wall to vaccuum the server room with an ultra-electrostatic vaccuum cleaner, that could make a Van De Graaff generator jealous.

Data destruction done wrong could cost your company millions

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Windows

Purge is the best one, and the hardest to do. But what if...

Well, Ubuntu (and every OS under the sun, probably) offers a setup file to be installed in a removable media, that installs an OS on a machine, and maybe runs a virtual one off a virtual memory space.

What if somebody made an UNINSTALL image? A completely agnostic, rewrite-three-times-zeroes-and-ones wiping tool that takes over and cleans ANY machine whole?

Of course, UEFI probably makes it easier, but any platform that runs off x86 (as in, any run-off-the-mill PC with a BIOS I am familiar with) should be able to get something like it. It would need firmware-level access and maybe a bunch of drivers, but you get what I mean.

So, there's probably an underlying difficulty in doing this that I have no idea, but if somebody cracks it, will make a fortune in wiping services.

If it was easy, somebody would have devised an "un-image" ready to deploy and wipe any machine clean by now, so I guess that would be the ultimate goal? You don't even need to worry about encryption, because you are triple-wiping it as well. Just deleting the encryption key isn't security (at all) enough.

I bet the ransomware folks have tools like this ready to go, and they use it against your will.

1,200 undergrads hung out to dry after jailbreak attack on laundry machines

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

Add arcades to the washing machines.

You play Street Fighter II while you wash your clothes. Offer the arcade as you wash. Added value. If anybody just wanna play the game, the washer becomes available for free.

It's not hard to make people wanna pay for their laundry if they feel they are getting their money's worth.

It's time mobile devs started to think seriously about foldable smartphones

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

If the screen folds, does it mean it doesn't break?

Because I want my regular non-fold phone to have that screen that BENDS instead of breaking.

And stop giving the manufacturers any reason to buy new phones every year is always a good reason.

Fighting planned obsolescence and supporting right to repair are not that important if the thing has no reason to collapse into its constituent parts as soon as it hits the floor. Even a swollen battery wouldn't make it fail, (altough you want to fix that asap.)

TLDR

I want a screen that doesn't break, but bends, even when the phone doesn't. I will drink to that.

Nano11 cuts Windows 11 down to size, grabbing just 2.8 GB of disk space

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

Can I get the "sensible install" option?

You know:

- Windows Update for actual security updates. Like it was once upon a time, with infinite reboot counter detection.

- It shows file extensions, and doesn't hide any type of files by default. (No more .docx.exe virus files).

- Windows Defender is there, but STFU if everything is fine.

- No adware.

- No collection of data, unless you explicitly turn it on, and never nags you to turn it on either.

- And all that OOBE, er, out-of-the-box.

I know, it takes 1 hour at most for some of this to be setup, but it should happen automatically.

I'm not saying it should fit in a DVD, but yeah, a removable bootable media size of 8GB at most would be nice.

Notice the troll icon.

Playing ball games in the datacenter was obviously stupid, but we had to win the league

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Trollface

Doom, anyone?

There´s the occasional tale of a late night match of Doom (or was it Quake?) that was only caught because the game was installed and uninstalled every Sunday, with a corrupted copy of a .DLL that came with the game overriding the Windows original, that was promptly restored on Monday, except when a script failed to run.

(Memory is sketchy, perhaps it was a BOFH edition, I don't remember anymore.)

Instead of playing IN FRONT of the datacenter, playing INSIDE it, was never disregarded as an option.

UK government trial of M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Coat

Let the enthusiasm phase pass.

As soon the enthusiasts let it go, the AI will reveal its true utility, but you gotta let people throw it around and see where it sticks.

Computers themselves, and lot of other tech had that same psychology trigger, people wanna use it for everything, even impractical things.

Tablets were the tools of yesteryear, for example.

Having a calculator on your wristwatch made a full comeback 40 years later, on a worse solution, a watch with a battery that lasts only 48 hours at most, instead of at least 2 years, but that's the symptom of "look, I can cram a smartphone cpu and screen on my wristwatch".

Windows 10 turns 10: Dying OS just worked, lacked compatibility chaos

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Can I get Aero Glass back?

- Please? Pretty Please?

- And hooking up the Start Menu to any corner?

- And an original bootable media that can't be infected, that comes in a box?

- And no Ads?

- And is compatible to WHATEVER I got, from a 486 to the last Ryzen.

- And runs all the Windows stuff I throw at it, from any era. Not a single .ini or .conf file in sight.

- I will pay for it.

- Match those and I will pay, no matter if its called Windows 12 or Linux.

Debian isn't waiting for 2038 to blow up, switches to 64-bit time for everything

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Pint

Curiously...

I got a 100 mbps soho router that wraps around in 2020, and goes back to 2000 or something like it. The calendar on it was artificially capped to 2020.

Yes, it should be in a landfill, but it still works.

Google’s Gemini refuses to play Chess against the mighty Atari 2600 after realizing it can't match ancient console

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Angel

Re: I don't get it.

This is exactly what I wanted to know. People call them AI but they are not "hard AI" as defined in sci-fi. I'm so happy to hear that. Carry on.

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
FAIL

I don't get it.

Any AI could objectively determine if it can beat another AI by measuring how many moves per second they can evaluate if they decided to play against themselves and then ask about any benchmark if possible. Or maybe they can throw themselves any specific subset of challenges, and see how long they take to evaluate all the moves.

The other AIs never had that idea of asking "how many moves can the ATARI AI analyze per second?" or maybe ask about the algorithms used. Which means they lack fundamental instructions.

How to trick ChatGPT into revealing Windows keys? I give up

Luiz Abdala Silver badge
Terminator

What kind of information to train on an AI...

I'm suddenly glad nobody posted nuclear launch codes, eh?

I wonder if you input enough cd-key codes, will it be able to make a keygen for them?

"Find all the rules used on the creation of these non-random string of letters, and generate one code following those rules" kinda thing.

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