Posts by cageordie

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Looking forward to seeing how the company owned by a man who supports a Russian asset for US president came to be providing equipment to the Russians.

If every PC is going to be an AI PC, they better be as good at all the things trad PCs can do

Re: But what...

When my ISP installed fiber they called the box they plugged it into a modem. It does seem to be modulating and demodulating signals too.

Report slams Boeing and NASA over shoddy quality that's delayed SLS blastoff

Re: "The report comes at an unfortunate time for Boeing's new CEO"

Assuming he doesn't just continue to put his bonus scheme and shareholder value above all else... like the law requires. Boeing execs think they have a press image problem, they are still making millions. They just need to make people stop saying bad things about them. So, the new guy can use the "take three envelopes" joke in real life.

Historically Boeing has a way of buying lenient trreatment

It hires former government officials when they leave government service. So turning a blind eye today gets you a sweetheart deal tomorrow.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

This reminds me of someone who wrote into Performance Car in the 80s complaining that he didn't feel safe over 50mph, so nobody should be able to go faster than that. The universal response was that if you don't feel safe above 50 then you shouldn't be driving. This is a you thing.

Julian Assange to go free in guilty plea deal with US

Even if the judge honors the plea deal

He will never be able to stop wondering if the US, or some other country he crossed, is going to try and spoil his day. The US used to pick people up off the streets in Europe and spirit them away to be tortured in other countries after all. Extraordinary rendition, as they used to call it.

Man behind deepfake Biden robocall indicted on felony charges, faces $6M fine

Spoofing caller IDs should be illegal and telecoms could stop it

The reason this hasn't been stopped is that nobody with power wants it stopped. So that means they either benefit directly, or they are being bribed. Back in the 90s, when I was designing military comms, we had requirements to precent break-ins and spoofing on our network. That took the best part of a day to design. We already had hardware protection and added end to end call validation. It was more than 25 years ago, so I don't remember all the details, but basically we called the source on a different path to ask if they were calling us. We also used some early public key signing to prove the end points. I dare say these days it wouldn't be enough, but it can be done. If the phone companies wanted to stop it they could stop passing in calls from India and allowing them to turn up with my local area code. Maybe they can't stop the first one, but once they have a few complaints they can black-ball the source. Not the call center, the service provider. Block the entire VoIP company. In this case the provider that vouched for the spoofed numbers should be stripped of that ability. But the phone companies make money from all these calls, so they don't want to control them.

Protected free speech, sadly.

Politicians wrote the laws not to apply to their spam. What a surprise.

Obviously someone who never saw an FCC enforcement

As a ham operator I used to read the enforcement actions for things like people broadcasting music on the ham bands. Or operating on a frequency they weren't licensed to use. Maybe a technician class operator who wanted to practice morse on the bands reserved for general and extra class. For first time offenders nothing happened, they just got told off. But for people who persisted in causing a nuisance the fines STARTED at $10,000 and confiscation of all equipment plus loss of license. Pretty easy to get to $6 million when they take each of the 5,000 cases as a separate incident. At the typical $10,000 rate you could say he was getting off easy.

UK's National Cyber Security Centre entry code cracks up critics

Government holds itself to very low standards.

In both the UK and US I have worked in places that the government imposes security standards on. In both cases I needed an access card as well as a personal four digit code. In both cases the doors are also under 24/7 surveillance, though I have no idea how good the live security was at watching their screens. But in the UK when someone shuffled an American into the building on their security card they were a former employee within 30 minutes. Amusingly the American wasn't held to blame, so they issued his visitors pass and let him attend the meeting.

What happened to agility and new business models? Cloud benefits have all gone to IT

Yeah, we didn't ask for that

I could say a lot about this, but nobody would read it. We recently moved to M365 and One Drive. We have not seen any benefit. This is the same sort of stupidity as buying Xeon processors in desktop machines. I have no idea who makes these decisions, but they are very hard to reverse or evade. We dealt with the move to One Drive for our home directories by copying everything to a local folder, which now isn't backed up, because the hit on build times was massive. We are a defense contractor, the idea of putting sensitive military information "in the cloud" should be anathema to our IT people. Apparently a Consultant said this was a good idea. They tried to make us charge the transition to our programs, but the DoD calls that sort of bullshit fraud. So we charged to IT, and they were furious. Our local bean counters, inside the project, said "it is no benefit to us, so we aren't paying for it".

Majority of Americans now use ad blockers

Re: I allow "acceptable ads"

There are other browsers. Something like that can convince me to quit using Chrome.

If they had behaved themselves I wouldn't need to block them

I've been on the Internet since the start. Advertisers chose to be The Enemy.

It started with ordinary adverts outside of the area of the article or information you wanted. But that didn't work for them. I didn't click their adverts, so they made them jiggle. So I found where they were coming from and added their server to my hosts file with an address of localhost. I even installed Apache in the hope it would respond with 404 and eliminate waiting and retries.

Next I got an email from Doubleclick offering to sell me a PC. I looked at their whois entry and emailed their CEO to ask where they got my email address. This was back in the days when they only had a few staff. He BSed me about me having registered. So they got added to the hosts file too.

And it has continued like that ever since, but now we have the ad blockers to help us out and stay ahead of the bad guys. If someone wants to insist that I have to watch their video adverts, well I don't need to view anything on their site.

Re: Do they work?

Yes, they work. They even let me block all shorts on YouTube. Even my ISP's router blocks doubleclick. Switching on add blocking on the router was a suggested step when configuring the router or I wouldn't have suspected they'd be so helpful.

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Not what I need

What I need is an extension to my anti-virus toolkit that can block any sniff of an AI or LLM sneaking into my machine.

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

Slightly misleading

Or at least it doesn't say what a lot of people will read the headline to say. This is about reaction mass, not propellant, which people generally understand to be fuel. An energy source. This is probably going to capture the extremely thin air and accelerate it out the back using electric power from solar cells. So why not be explicit and say reaction mass? Well then it's not as attractive because there's no mystery.

HP print rental service seeks more users to become subscription addicts

The revenue stream model

Businesses like a revenue stream instead of a sale. So sure, this works for them. If they had been honest about their technology and their pricing they'd have done better in the long term. I have been around for the entire life of consumer color printers, so I've seen then move to a loss lead model where they expected to make the big bucks on the consumables. That was OK to begin with, but then the greed kicked in and they started making the ink cartridges smaller and more expensive. That fueled the demand for third party sources and damaged their loss lead model. So they went protectionist. That didn't work so now they want to get a guaranteed revenue. That's only going to work for a small subset of real customers. Meanwhile Brother remained honest. I buy Brother printers and toner cartridges. I don't buy inkjets because it seemed like every time I came to use them something was wrong. So went Epson and Cannon. HP was always Highly Priced. So for the last 15 years we've been on Brother printers. A 2370 and a 9330. Nothing would make me subscribe to HP. We used to have some at work, they were replaced with Kyocera printers whenever the HP printers failed.

Dell promises 'every PC is going to be an AI PC' whether you like it or not

A great reason to build your own

One huge advantage of home building my own PCs is that I don't have to buy anything that includes AI. Or anything else I don't want.

Re: HAHAHA

Right. Something to sell to people who won't pay $2k for a graphics card, or maybe something to add on for people who will pay $2k for a graphics card.

Re: "replete with AI-based noise cancellation"

Best noise cancellation I ever experienced was on military headsets. That was completely analogue. We could stand next to a tank, with the engine running, and couldn't even hear it. We could feel it though. I was developing comms gear for the UK military. You could talk in a normal voice and be heard perfectly and if you took the headsets off you'd have to shout to be heard. Not a microprocessor involved. The comms system used Altera MAX-10000 parts, so it's not like we were all in the past, but the headsets did all the ANR and they were analogue and wonderful. I think one type was by Tannoy.

Re: well, he's half right.

California? Dell is a Texas company. Amusing biggotry. You seem to have a chip on each shoulder. I think you mean adopt, not adapt. Adopt is using it, adapt is changing it. Take your own advice, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Bye.

Not really

Here I sit on my Dell M6800 that was my workstation laptop that I got in about 2014 when I was working for a flash storage startup. When we were bought out by an Apple using company we got to keep our laptops for $100. I replaced the wiped system drive with an M2 drive and later replaced the WiFi card with one that would do WiFi 6. Other than that everything in it is the way it was delivered 10 years ago. We have a lot of old Dell machines at work from when we used to buy instead of leasing. Perhaps we are buying the more professional machines? No consumer in their right mind would want an M6800.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Err... not so fast

They are in damage limitation mode now. So they are saying what they need to while trying to find a way to make sure they get maximum bonus payments.

And then there's the engine inlet problem...

To keep their common certification Boeing also kept the de-icing system in the 1950s. The 737 is a short two engine version of the 707 which first flew in 1957 but was a production version of the 367-80 which first flew in 1954 and was itself derived from 1940s designs. So anyway, the overhead panel, which controls fuel, hydraulics, electrical systems, and bleed air, among other things, is from the original 737. It has had additions, but you can see to look at it that it is a history of switch and display technologies. Nothing significant was ever moved or removed.

So the 737 MAX has manual de-icing controls. In the past the engine inlets were metal. De-icing air is passed through them and heats them up so ice can't form. Two things have changed though, as engines become more efficient they also run hotter, and the inlets were changed to composite. On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets. But on Boeing you have to watch the temperature and conditions and switch de-icing on when appropriate. But if you forget to switch it off the deicing when not in icing conditions you cook the composite inlet, because the hotter engine gives hotter bleed air, and the composite inlet can't stand the same abuse as metal. The cooked composite isn't as strong as it once was and can fail, blowing parts into the engine, which then deconstructs itself.

How should they have done it? Automatic anti-ice, like the 777 and 787. It's not that they don't have the tech, it's just that the aircraft is stuck in the 1950s because some big customers don't want to have a second type rating required.

Microsoft braces for automatic AI takeover with Copilot at Windows startup

Death to Copilot

Like Clippy, back in the 90s, the first thing I will do when they start this automatically is spend the necessary time to murder it. I don't want any 'help' from a jumped up chatbot.

NIST: If someone's trying to sell you some secure AI, it's snake oil

Everything is going to be AI

Whether it has any AI content or not, that's going to be the marketing BS for the near future. Just like 'fuzzy logic' was in the past. Just more bullshit in most cases.

Amazon already has a colossal ads business and will extend it to Prime Video in January

No comment on how this has been received by Prime members?

Conservatively, there were at least 100 "WTF is this bullshit?" posts on Reddit alone. Prime was originally the way that members got two day shipping for free, but Amazon has rolled back the two day shipping to two business days if it's available locally. So it might actually take a week for something to reach you from the other coast of the US. If it is in stock. If it is out of stock it will get to you sometime. If you spend enough they also ship for free anyway, and usually in the same time. So if you find advertising really unacceptable, and you don't feel like adding another $36 on top of the recent Prime price rise... well there are other vendors. It will be interesting to see how many people quit Prime. When Disney+ offered to increase the price or show adverts I cancelled that. What is the upside to me of them unilaterally changing our contract only a couple of months into the contract period? Do the free-with-ads videos become $3/month without ads too? That would be something worth considering.

Are they also going to show adverts on movies I 'own'? Do I lose access to things I 'own' if I quit Prime?

But as it is I think I am just being screwed. I won't watch adverts. If it is intrusive I will cancel.

Windows 12: Savior of PC makers, or just an apology for Windows 11?

Windows 12 AI? No thanks!

No AI in this household. And that's the way it's staying. No software as a service either, we don't do subscription software. Period. We also don't touch printers that have DRM on the media. And we don't have anything voice activated. I already dual boot to Linux anyway, and I've used it for work for 25 years. If MS Windows ceased to exist it wouldn't really inconvenience me.

Companies mostly don't do that. Big companies especially. But then they don't keep machines that log either, unless it's in a development environment like mine where the machines we do the main development on are 10 years old and the laptops we only use for email and documentation get replaced with decent new machines every three years. But then we also run RHEL on the development machines.

That time a JPL engineer almost killed a Mars Rover before it left Earth

I hate breakout boxes.

Make a proper cable. Test it before you use it. Always wonder "what is the worst that could happen" and assume that some day someone will do that.

We have a $10,000 piece of hardware in each test setup that will last three minutes without cooling. When we originally made the rig we used diodes to supply power to a cooling fan from the pre and post launch PSUs so that we would always know it was cooled if it was powered. Two years with no incidents. Then there was a glitch in the program, mechanical had a redesign before other teams could continue. All the other engineers were assigned to new programs. After a year my new program was done and they needed me back on the original program. To my surprise there were now 3 PSUs. The new folks thought it was more important to be able to check the voltage and current on the cooling fan before powering on. We complained. We were overruled by the new chief engineer, because she trusted the people she knew and they had told her our way was wrong. A year later we have toasted $30,000 in hard to replace hardware, because people assume the cooling is always on, and they don't check. If we have a mains failure, common where thunderstorms and snow happen, the PSUs reset to 0 Volts and Amps. So one time someone checked the PSUs and found the cooling was not on, so they enabled it. Then they powered on, but nothing happened. They recalled the power settings and tried again. Three minutes later they stopped getting data from the subsystem. Yes, the cooling was powered, with 0V and 0A.

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

I'll take the v4 please.

Fuel injection would be nice, ABS and traction control for those bad traction occasions. Other than that I don't want or need any distractions. And they have no need or right to know what I am doing.

Re: Why?

I would be immensely surprised if it was only one. The last two embedded programs I have been on have spawned ARMs like some Indian god.

Copilot coming to Windows 10 to help navigate the OS's twilight years

Hidden the moment it arrived

I despise helpers that watch what I am doing. So I disabled it the moment it was installed. Or more accurately I hid it. MS is probably still spying and phoning home. Same as all the other megacorps we allow into our lives.

I remember when Clippy turned up in Word. The whole team spent the next couple of hours discovering how to disable it. That was before the WWW was commonly available and we had no external resources to use. By 10am Clippy was banished. (Dave, it looks like you are trying to kill me... yup)

GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims

And I need this why?

They say this is for cell phones and then say that the use case is for autonomous vehicles, etc. That sort of thing should already be using WAAS, which gives pretty good accuracy. But you can't rely on GPS for avoiding the environment, especially other people in it. So what are they really up to? Is this going to let them sell more adverts?

Intel CEO Gelsinger dismisses 'pretty insignificant' Arm PC challenge

Well he would say that wouldn't he

He has to say that or the stock crashes and he loses a lot of net worth. ARM is undercutting the PCs the way PCs undercut the mainframes. Forty years ago IBM was saying PCs were no threat to their business. How many people are buying IBM's mainframes now?

Cisco to sell enterprise version of $400 Bang & Olufsen earbuds

B&O was the choice of fanboyz before fanboyz were born

Back when real men were buying Rega Planar 3s with a Nagaoka MP11 Boron and Quad 33 preamp to drive their Quad 303 power amp into Kef Concord IV speakers from Lintone Audio in Gateshead, their rich friends parents were buying B&O music centers from J.G.Windows in the Central Arcade in Newcastle. For the price of a good used car. The difference was that the less expensive version sounded much better, and could be fixed when it went wrong. My brother still has my Quad 33/303 and Kef speakers, I replaced the capacitors many years ago. The B&O stuff looked marvelous, but was impossible for almost anyone to service. My friend's parents lost theirs for a month when it failed, the shop took a week to find out how to open it up.

So there's nothing new here, just people with too much money being separated from it. I think I paid about $30 for the ones I use. They work perfectly well, last longer than I usually have time to use them, and charge in their case. Once every few weeks I have to charge the case too. I'll keep my $400.

Lawrence Livermore lab repeats fusion breakthrough – yep, still kinda works

And for their next trick

After they get net positive energy for the whole facility they can solve the problem of where the fuel is going to come from.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Ah! The perfect addition...

I was in the office above Juicero when they were in the Googleplex. I was working on a 70GB/s flash array. We met one of their people as we went out to lunch one day and she told us about the product and the backing they had. We were polite and didn't laugh in her face. Anyway, can't complain about startups, they got me the house I'm in how. And out of the Bay Area.

It's not a Thorens Reference

So... just another great way of taking money from fools who don't mind surface noise and think they have 'discovered' a better way to listen to music. Been there, done that. Went digital and would never go back. Save me the BS.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Perhaps they can address storage too?

The first Samsung S23 I looked at is $1000 for a phone with 256GB storage and $1134 for $512GB storage. A Samsung 512GB microSD is around $40. Retail price for a 1TB microSD from a reputable manufacturer is around $100. iPhone 14 pro price difference between 256GB and 512GB is $100 on the same site. So how about mandating a microSD slot while they are mandating the replaceable battery? It can be internal, it's not like I'd change it often. But it would free us from rip-off memory pricing.

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

Been watching Paul?

Douglas Adams was a sad loss.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

I have actually updated recently, but from really old machines

I had a little Dell system as a media PC and that was impossible to update for Windows 11, so I swapped it for my main machine which was a six year old Ryzen 7 1700. I updated that old machine to Windows 11 Pro, which required adding a TPM to the Gigabyte motherboard.

I am not updating my 2014 Dell M6800 laptop because that installed Windows 11 Pro quite happily and is still fast enough.

That's the thing with most of these machines, I use at work and home, they are fast enough. My work laptop gets changed every three years, but my other assets, the lab machines, they soldier on for at least ten years. We mostly use them as serial terminals into embedded hardware. So a twenty year old machine would do if we could get the updates for security requirements. We only keep the FPGA development and science machines up to date, because those take significant time to run their compilations and to execute their models. I don't need a 13th generation processor to run Word, Outlook, and MobaXterm.

Unless your machine is very very old that's not accurate

I have WIndows 11 Pro on a Dell M6800 that's at least nine years old. I am also running 11 Pro on a Ryzen 7 1700 which is about the same age, in that case I had to add the TPM to the GigaByte motherboard, which was hard to find. So no, Windows 11 doesn't require you to change all the systems.

Europe lagging behind South Korea, Japan, US in 5G rollout

And why should I care?

I have a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra and right now it says I have 5G. Absolutely zero improvement on 4G in my house. Not that I need it with WiFi6 and gigabit fiber, but still, all that talk and no action. However, outside of this university town, we notice significantly poorer coverage with the S22 that with the 4G S10. The phone is somewhat faster, and the screen is a bit bigger, but I'd have been just as happy with another S10 to replace the one that was bulging apart. I replaced the battery to see if I could and now my daughter has a perfectly good phone and I could have saved a thousand dollars.

Re: 5G has a lot of drawbacks for users

I have to try that. My experience of 5G so far is that the coverage is less and the data rates make no difference.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

If they can prove their diversity allegations this could get expensive

I guess we'll find out, if they sue for the wrongful dismissal. Personally, not how I would handle it. There are plenty of other jobs.

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

Re: For once

Oh sure, Google who watches everyone has no responsibility for what goes on under its roof. So if a religious sect is taking over its departments that's just fine and not their concern. LOL! Someone tried this at Motorola when I was there, HR told them to cut it out or leave. They were contractors too. HR was in charge of how people behaved in their office.

Warning: Colleagues are unusually likely to 'break' their monitors soon

Over priced and under sized

Seems expensive for a 32" monitor. As luck would have it I use a 43" Samsung TV as a monitor. 4K and only $279 when I bought it. Works perfectly. But then I've never found a console, with its clunky controls, attractive as a games machine. I'll stick to the PC for games.

Semiconductor industry growth to slow in 2022, warns IDC

Have you tried to find FPGAs recently

The only ones we can get right now are the ones we already bought and have in stores. Lead times for high end Xilinx parts are all over a year. It doesn't seem likely that a few fab plants will change that.