Posts by 9Rune5

Amazon exec's husband jailed for two years for insider trading. Yes, with Amazon stock

Re: Got too greedy yet.....

I believe MJI's first sentence referred to the shorters and the final sentence congratulated GameStop investors with the success in throwing a monkey wrench in the works.

Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance

Re: Laptop + Monitor = two computers?

The local power company decided to do some upgrades today and I was left powerless for four hours. Laptop battery kept on for three hours while the ups powered my network. Sometimes a laptop can be a lifesaver, but I too prefer a beefy desktop.

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: Thankfully, the world is simple

Someone once claimed that the reason they do this is to effectively demonstrate how insanely expensive it is to solely rely on renewables when you do not count nuclear as a renewable.

Those hippie protesters will then have to face angry mobs who very much like their hospitals and jobs supplied with reliable electricity.

OTOH that would be one helluva expensive lesson to learn. Hopefully they will see reason ere long.

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

The gap year

Even when you get past this, expect to be asked what you’ve been doing, and the response of a blank look and mumble gives the impression you’ve been watching daytime reality TV.

My ex-boss (incidentally the best manager I have ever worked for) had such an interview once. The candidate exclaimed he did not want to discuss his gap year, which of course put our imagination into high gear.

The sad bit is that my ex-boss is a very nice and understanding person and I believe she would have accepted a "yeah... spent a year in the joint" reply. The non-answer was worse.

Microsoft: Behold, at some later date, the next generation of Windows

Where are the walls?

Microsoft has added a lot of tooling over the recent years. Much of it is geared towards supporting multiple platforms, since most developers share your concerns.

My latest project at work will most likely run exclusively on Windows boxes, but its CI tests are run using docker and linux. That is despite using a package called "Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting.WindowsServices", which as you guessed is very Windows-centric. There is still no #ifdef involved or "if (runningInWindows)" in my code. It just works, regardless of platform.

In the end I can deliver something that fits my customers' environments, both now and in the future. I believe many of them will adopt containers (and Linux) hand over fist in the coming years, so that is where my projects are moving as well.

So please be specific which walls you're seeing.

That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall started by one engineer trying a quick fix

Four-year-old

and the engineer also had a four-year-old script to do the job.

FTFY!

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

Re: Criminal to pay Criminals?

I am willing to bet that the CEO's salary is at least twice that of his most senior IT staff.

Or maybe I'm wrong, because if they do not pay more than the googles and msfts of this world, then who would want to work on a pipe?

Elon Musk hits the brakes on taking Bitcoin for Tesla purchases

Making a point

When I first heard this news my thought was that Musk did this deliberately. First he purchased a bunch of bitcoins, and then made a huge announcement denouncing them.

Because the guy isn't dumb. He must've realized bitcoins were power hungry before his initial investment.

Some stayed in Croatian castles. Some hid in cars. We speak to techies who experienced lockdown in very different ways

Re: Live where you want to live, not where you have to

Is the whole team remote or just new hires?

I think they are leaning towards 'the whole team'.

What you are describing sounds more like bad mgmt to me. I try to avoid those type of environments.

But --it happens everywhere. A year ago I basically accused my then manager of sabotage. He was extremely incompetent and rather nasty. And he was of the opinion that tech leads and architects must work on-site. Fortunately my view was shared by others, so that manager got replaced by somebody much more qualified.

Live where you want to live, not where you have to

A friend of mine is relocating to a big house (almost the size of a mansion) that comes with its own tennis court (roughly the size of his old apartment). His employer is about to announce that they will now hire people regardless of where they live.

I have long been thinking that people should be less accepting of having to live someplace they are not happy.

I did that myself a few years ago. My location is not perfect (no tennis court! :) ), but more than good enough.1.5 km to the beach (in any direction) and a fiber connection to the rest of the world.

'Millions' of Dell PCs will grant malware, rogue users admin-level access if asked nicely

Re: Ding dong dell

Ding dong dell

Coders from hell

Bringing your laptop to death's knell

But I'm sure their warranty is swell

While your files gets encrypted ever so schnell

Their content now invisible to your shell

Time to pay, who pray tell,

dearly for the anti-malware spell

Re: Yea, possibly not just Dell

I was firmware updating a new Lenovo the other week at User level privilege

Hopefully the firmware file was signed and the driver first verified that the signature checked out okay.

Either way, it would not have hurt them to require elevation so that we won't have to question their implementation.

There was probably customer demand to do it the way they did. After all, an elevated process can spin up drivers as needed. So the driver is pre-installed to allow user-mode apps to initiate the flash. But it certainly does not feel like this approach will be found on any 'security best practices' lists.

Can you blindly trust any third-party device driver as long as you are running Linux?

Microsoft bows to the inevitable and takes Visual Studio 64-bit for 2022 version

Re: I guess I was wrong

You weren't 100% wrong, but you weren't 100% correct either.

One could easily butt heads with various limitations. E.g. debugging .net memory leaks was problematic, because the debugger could easily conclude that any memory dump bigger than a couple of gigabytes was simply a bridge too far.

Now, they rectified that problem to some extent (spawn off a separate process for the debugger I think), but it was unnecessary to begin with. Had devenv.exe been 64-bit to begin with, it would've just worked.

There is also a performance angle here. Back in the day, it wasn't uncommon to harvest at least 7% performance gain from going 64-bit. I do not believe 32-bit code caught up with that. The extra registers alone is worth the price of admission.

I suspect once VS2022 has matured through a major patch or two, it will be noticeably better than what we have now. I expect refactoring improvements on par with jetbrains' reSharper product. (I suspect the 32-bit limitations made such improvements difficult)

Cross-platform Windows Presentation Framework, anyone? The short answer: yes. Unpacking Avalonia

all occupy about 500MB of RAM during normal operation

If only that was all they did...

Epic's game store currently burns a steady 1% CPU on my 8 core ryzen (16 logical cores). And if I switch to the store view, it burns 3-4% CPU. That does not sound too much, until you realize that it is burning about 20-25% of one core. And it is just sitting there: I'm not even using it. Starting the thing is a monumental task, but I'm guessing a lot of that is spent firing off several http requests to do whatever it needs to do. It is a far cry from Steam and perhaps the reason they have to give away a game every week to persuade punters to not jump ship.

Cræpware.

if I need to build a desktop application

How likely is that? Enterprises seem to shy away from desktop apps in any shape or form? The lure of zero-deployment web apps is very strong. I believe our industry just took a giant step back.

What happens when back-flipping futuristic robot technology meets capitalism? Yeah, it’s warehouse work

Beats (my) expectations

I thought they would end up sitting in an electric wheelchair while manning a conveyor belt spot welding parts to other parts (like a robotic arm).

Kinda reminds me of that episode of "Silicon Valley" where all their cool technology ended up as "the box" that got stuck in a rack someplace nobody could see it.

Clothes retailer Fatface: Someone's broken in and accessed your personal data, including partial card payment details... Don't tell anyone

Re: I don't often read these articles about data breaches.

You may have predicted the outcome of their upcoming rebranding exercise.

If so: Cheers indeed!

Remember Apple's disastrous butterfly keyboards? These lawsuits against the iGiant just formed a super class action

Re: Can i sue other companies for crappy design?

If you buy something that normally lasts for maybe a decade (or more) and part of it fails after a couple of months, and then the replacement also fails... etc...

Then yeah, I say 'sue!'.

However, when you buy a 30 year old car, then I do not think you can expect much. Or when you buy a VW, famously known for fudging their numbers a lot. Or when you buy a French car.

China's top chip company speaks of massive silicon shortage felt around the globe

"shortage of petrochemicals"

This statement took me a bit by surprise, because the oil price was low last year and has barely recouped. I suspected that perhaps because the demand for gasoline dropped, the refineries had reduced their production which in turn affected other areas.

But according to https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-week-texas-freeze-seen-triggering-monthslong-plastics-shortage-11615973401 the shortage in chemicals is due to the Texas freeze.

The February freeze that triggered mass blackouts in Texas led to chemical plant shutdowns that are disrupting global supply chains, causing a shortage of the raw materials needed for everything from medical face shields to smartphones.

Hopefully this is a short-lived shortage.

GitLab latest to ditch 'master' as default initial branch name: It's now simply called 'main'

"Boss"

I thought involuntarily imported workers often referred to their foreman as "boss".

Should we avoid this word in the future too? I sometimes work for people that I'd rather refer to as "jerk-face" or "assnut" and would really like a valid excuse.

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

Wait!

I didn't get to vote!

Somebody point me at the poll so I can ...hack the results.

We need a 20MW 20,000-GPU-strong machine-learning supercomputer to build EU's planned digital twin of Earth

Re: Who needs this?

I was going to post something along the same lines, but just want to add that I'd love to see one of these rigs produce schematics for an even bigger supercomputer that will be able to compute the question.

Nvidia cripples Ethereum mining on GeForce RTX 3060 to deter crypto bods from nabbing all the kit at launch

Re: Older drivers?

I doubt older drivers will support the new GPUs. Your objection is probably the main reason they aren't pursuing this for already released 3080 and 3090.

Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep

Re: LOL, naive dev didnt think Microsoft would sell his information

How do you know that MS wasn't told "sure you can let your punters install Ubuntu, but only if you provide us with their 411"?

I'd like more details on this story.

Re: First response to creepy cold calls is

Or set the phone down, with mic muted till they hang up.

I assume that if you happen to be conducting some 'business' in the restroom, then muting the microphone is optional?

Mine is the one with a box of chili in the pocket.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

Ups and downs of Synology

I have a DS918+ which has served me quite well for the past two years.

Synology's software is easy to use, but lately I've realised I am slowly (but surely) moving away from Synology's own packages and over to docker. One problem is with runtime versions. Synology's own packages use older runtimes (I think I had three different versions of python at one point) and it struck me that docker was just easier and felt a lot cleaner.

I enjoy their filesystem though. I've already replaced two drives in order to gain a bigger volume, and I was able to do that without offloading anything. I'm keeping an eye out for alternatives though (https://serverfault.com/a/272835/ is one thread I'd love to see some more in depth answers to).

Its caching strategy looks a bit cumbersome to me. I have a few things running that would benefit from the m.2 drives I added, but Synology enforces those to be designated for its own caching purposes. I suspect I could do better and actually help the thing hibernate during the night.

The way it handles its volume baffles me. I believe that I have to create shares off its root. I can't create my own hierarchy and share something deeper down.

Another quirk is the lack of WireGuard support. There are some workarounds, but nothing official at this point AFAICT. Isn't their OS based on Linux? Why does it feel like they're lagging behind?

I suspect I, at this point, might be better served by FreeNAS. Assuming I could still get a dynamic RAID like SHR up and running.

Microsoft's Extensible Storage Engine (JET Blue) source code arrives on GitHub – sadly comments not included

Re: to stay on the safe side ...

If you had been watching Dave's garage regularly you would realize just _why_ the comments were stripped (albeit temporarily) and why your post looks foolish.

That said, if the code is well written, with meaningful function names, comments are not all that important. Those who use JET are better off now than they were only a week ago.

How do you save an ailing sales pitch? Just burn down the client's office with their own whiteboard

Re: Lies

My first thought was "there was probably a reason why that device was disconnected in the first place".

I.e. it was already broken, but hadn't quite let out all of the magic smoke yet.

A little googling suggests that power cables used in 110V environments have a beefier wire gauge (because apparently there is only a single hot lead?). So it should have worked better than the cable it replaced.

But yeah, some of these stories sometimes feel like someone is blowing smoke up our .... :)

Smartphones are becoming like white goods, says analyst, with users only upgrading when their handsets break

covid-19 a factor in this?

More people in lockdown at home: Less reason to use an awkwardly tiny device and spend more time with a laptop (or better yet a desktop)?

Re: Becoming like?

I bought a TV two years ago.

FWIW, don't bother too much with the "smart" TV features. You are going to end up with some kind of box that replaces the built-in shite anyway. (I use an nVidia Shield).

Also: They still have not landed on a standard, so you either get DolbyVision or HDR10+. And if you get a panel that is bright enough to do HDR some real justice, you'll probably not have low enough latency to play games on it.

TL;DR: Planned obsolescence is still a thing.

What's a COVID-19 outbreak? Amazon gets all Trumpy over Alabama warehouse workers' mail-in vote to form a union

Re: NFL Union since 1956

I started getting irritated at the rich, whining idiots during the '87 season.

From an outsiders POV, I find it fascinating how much money is tied up in professional sports. And though part of me is jealous of the overpaid athletes, I'm even more jealous at the team owners who rake in even more money.

I completely fail to see the value in anything those guys (be it owners or athletes) are doing. I get that it is a fun pastime activity (I too love playing various sports with friends), but to have that as a job? And an insanely well-paid job at that? wtf... (and then there are people who spend their time watching other people have fun? Some form of voyeurism? Or is it 'monkey see, monkey do'?)

This world is nuts.

There may be not one but two new air leaks in International Space Station: Russian boss tells us not to panic

Assange

Is he still refusing to identify the leak?

Four women seek release from forced arbitration to sue Infosys for widespread gender discrimination

Re: A spokeswoman then commented...

I am very disappointed they did not mention 'sustainability'. Uncaring bastards.

Faster optic fibers and superior laser sensors set to descend from space

Dodgy

This matters because plenty of returning astronauts report dodgy vision

Have we tried sending an astronaut with existing dodgy vision? Maybe his vision will improve? (My vision happens to be proper dodgy, and I hereby volunteer my services)

Assembly language, arcade games, and YouTube: The Reg speaks to former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer

Re: One fan here

@Steve:

Look for "Dave's garage" (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNzszbnvQeFzObW0ghk0Ckw)

One fan here

This is not the first time The Reg has linked to Dave's youtube channel, and over the past couple of months I've become a fan.

His deep-dives into the sordid world of LEDs is fascinating and I fear I will eventually have to pick up some LEDs myself one day. I am not stupid however, and I realize I will probably end up electrocuting myself, but I will hopefully have some fun before I get to that point.

There are various gold nuggets to find as well. Even something mundane as Windows' format drive dialog becomes interesting when Dave covers it and explains why (oh why!) the thing is limited to 32GB when faced with FAT32.

The outro to each video ("this chair is for someone who likes to rock") doesn't fully make sense to me though, but makes me smile nonetheless.

Well worth a visit.

My website has raised its anchor and set sail into the internet oceans without me

Re: Respect

If you hadn't typed "google" into google.com, I'm confident your 5G phone would be firing at all 5G cylinders right now.

Google says it’s the cleanest cloud, also reveals deal with Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company for new cloud region

As does the internal reaction to working with an arm of the world’s largest fossil fuel company.

Isn't that a good news scenario if you're a fervent believer in the CO2 climate knob hypothesis?

A fossil fuel company that is now looking for other business areas would suggest that said business is looking for alternatives to keep operating when their main business fizzles out.

Or is the expectation here that we the citizens should make this company pay for their folly? Run them into the ground as it were?

Personally I'd be more concerned with any human rights violations perpetrated by the Saudis, but that is just me.

Trump administration says Russia behind SolarWinds hack. Trump himself begs to differ

Re: "Fingerprints" is very vague and hand-wavery.

Those who track the various APT groups do track the modus operandi, coding techniques, etc.

And nobody would be capable of doing the exact same type of monitoring and run a false flag operation this way?

Why ...not?

The US is currently waging a cold war on both nations.

...but... I think China consider Biden to be a weak candidate that they can push a lot when it comes time to sit down and negotiate a new trade deal.

Russia's problems are less recent and they fare badly no matter who controls the white house. They might find it a fun exercise to spike the election enough to cause a stir, but I do not see them gaining anything by doing so. Except perhaps in Syria, seeing as the Democrats were getting ready to wage a war there. (it mystifies me why the media thought that was an okay thing to do)

But sure... The russian hacker(s) left some sort of Putin thumbprint, found by the same idiots who couldn't keep their systems secure in the first place.

And hey, Dominion is probably not using any SolarWinds software, nor are they susceptible to that level of hacking. Besides, every Dominion software release is heavily scrutinized and compiled by a trusted third-party. It is only the other guys who fell victim to this attack.

Never mind that Christine Fang was in bed with one of the most vocal proponents of "Russian collusion" Eric Swallwell. Maybe she was really a russian?

Re: "Or do all Russia-based hackers sit in the pocket of Kremlin?"

"Fingerprints" is very vague and hand-wavery. An example or two would go a long way... I do understand that an individual hacker may reuse old tricks and there might be a red thread to follow in one way or another, but that a whole nation of hackers would act in uniform does not quite compute. For one thing, hacking involves a lot of outside the box thinking. If every russian hacker thought outside the box in the same way, then there would be no russian hackers, because it is easy to protect against group think, but not not so easy to protect against every insane idea that someone bounces around.

Hackers that are smart enough to infiltrate SolarWinds, yet stupid enough to get caught by their own government.... Something of an oxymoron I would have thought, but okay, I'll take your word for it.

How can you tell?

This has been bugging me for years: But how can you tell it was 'x' that hacked you?

If a skilled russian hacker breached a company like SolarWinds, I would imagine he'd try to sell his discovery to the highest bidder. Would e.g. China bid less than Russia? Or do all Russia-based hackers sit in the pocket of Kremlin? Was it the "Putin rulez, da!" comment in the malware source that gave them away?

Or is it the fact that China and USA are very friendly at the moment, so China shows the US complete respect? (*cough* Christina Fang *cough*)

How to leak data via Wi-Fi when there's no Wi-Fi chip: Boffin turns memory bus into covert data transmitter

Larry? Larry Ellison? Is that you?

Larry Ellison says he's not following Oracle to Texas, prefers his private Hawaii pad

Re: Really

I live very close to the Norwegian border.

Re: Really

I, for one, thought it was fascinating.

The 'vid has accelerated adoption of letting people work from home.

The logical next step is for people to move where they actually want to live, rather than being forced to shack up next to work.

I chose an island off the west coast of Sweden. Larry obviously have different tastes (and money) so he chose a slightly different island.

Then there is the question of outsourcing. I see some companies adopting javascript on the server side. In my mind that leads to crapware and spaghetticoding. At which point it shouldn't make much difference if you outsource coding to a small village in the middle of nowhere on a different continent, or hire people fresh from high school. (just remember to use a simple password for your github repository to make things easier for all involved)

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

so far there has been very little real evidence that it's happening

Oki, a random search result, on google no less:

"Former Philadelphia Judge of Elections Convicted of Conspiring to Violate Civil Rights and Bribery"

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-elections-convicted-conspiring-violate-civil-rights-and-bribery

Are you really of the belief that there was no cheating whatsoever? I can understand the belief that there was no significant amount of cheating (that would effectively skew the result), but to assert absolutely no cheating whatsoever is a pretty bold claim IMO.

On one hand you have countless democrats who decry Trump as being "The Orange Hitler".

If you (or anyone) was in a position where it would be possible to skew the results, and you thought that one candidate was literally Hitler... Would it not be tempting to do a little skewing? Would you not, in fact, be morally obliged to do so? What would it say about you as a person if you did not do your part to keep Hitler out of office?

Same if you were a reporter. Is it not your moral duty to help the other candidate win and downplay allegations of fraud? (never mind that said reporters should have done their job prior to the nomination and helped support a candidate who hasn't reached retirement age)

Re: Happy Monday everyone

you know "Russian's hacking us", well that just in Hollywood isn't it?

Well, yes; in the real world it is the Chinese who are hacking us.

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Re: Mobile phones are crap

The majority of call I make are to fixed line numbers

Good for you!

I can't justify paying for a fixed line number subscription on my end in addition to my mobile phone subscription. Not sure the phone company will even deliver such a service. (well, there is IP telephony...)

As someone said, what we really need are standards, so we can choose our preferred client (note the singular) and join meetings regardless of what the organiser uses.

Absolutely. I think it is just a matter of time.

But the main thing is that you miss the point.

I do see the point, but I want to avoid suffering low quality audio and a conversation mostly consisting of "you said you bought an...elephant?" and "oh I see, a _red jacket_". Same way I prefer e-mail over fax: There was a time you could fax any number of fax machines too, but the quality was crap and the speed was atrocious. Less spam though, but in the end people realized the quality was just too poor. You see where I'm going with this..?

India to spend up big on submarine cable to sparsely-populated but strategically-placed remote island group

Re: My island has almost everything.

Our naval facilities currently consists of a harbour cafe and an armada of 20' (and shorter) boats.

Oki, so we could beef up our naval base somewhat. Especially considering that some Swedish-Danish naval battles took place right outside here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dynekilen).

But I was indeed more concerned with the climate. This summer was a bit disappointing. The nice days were often ruined by a jellyfish invasion. If there is less than five meters between the jellyfishes then I will remove myself from the water..

As an island dwelling fiber-attached netizen, I'm intrigued. My island has almost everything. What we lack is a warmer climate.Whether I continue dwelling here or move someplace closer to equator, will it make a difference to my employer?