Posts by pdh

M365 Family users wake up to notice 'Your subscription expired'

Re: And that's why...

My hat is off to you who are able to keep your local systems up 100% of the time, with never a failure.

Not that I believe that you actually exist, but if you do, I envy you -- you don't even need backups, do you?

Re: And that's why...

I upvoted you, but let's remember that locally installed software can fail too, and not all users are well-equipped to diagnose and repair the fault when that happens.

Nothing is perfect. Whether you run software locally or in the cloud, you're going to see occasional failures.

When disaster strikes, proper preparation prevents poor performance

One day, your DR system will face a realistic test

That's all but guaranteed. The only question is, will the test be part of a planned exercise on your part, or will it be the result of some unexpected external factor.

California goes ape with bill to crown Bigfoot official state cryptid

Perfect

The president and founder of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization is named Matt Moneymaker. Perfect, just perfect.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

"DEI done right means that if there are two equal candidates"

Thing is, they're almost never exactly equal. There's almost always a swarm of plus and minus factors for each candidate. DEI says that race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc should always be considered among those factors. As opposed to the Bad Old Days, when race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc were always considered among those factors.

Poland’s 2nd astronaut brings pierogi to the ISS party

Freeze dried?

I am a dedicated fan of the pierogi, but freeze dried? That just sounds terrible.

Humans brought the heat. Earth says we pay the price

Re: Just to be clear it's *not* the suicide of the human race

As George Carlin said, the planet will be fine. It's the people who are f--ked.

White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

Re: Eh?

The only semi-legitimate explanation that I can think of is that perhaps it was a test. That is, maybe a large number of the drones were indeed being operated by the FAA, and they (or some other partner agency) wanted to keep track of which drones were reported by the public and which were not. Maybe "people report this kind of drone but they don't notice that kind;" or noting observation patterns based on time of day; or maybe for calibration: you send up 50 drones and note that you get 100 reports from the public. Hence in the future you can estimate that if you get X number of reports, there were probably X/2 number of actual drones.

Not saying that I believe in this explanation, just that it's a possibility.

Even Netflix struggles to identify and understand the cost of its AWS estate

Re: Then... there are the 'exit' costs

Exit costs can be high even if you're totally on-prem -- it's not just a cloud thing. Ask VMware users about that...

Euro execs extend net zero timescales amid energy cost and supply crunch

The real inconvenient truth

Actually reducing atmospheric CO2 will require two things: a significant decline in the standard of living in developing countries (comparable to the sacrifices that were made on the home front in World War 2), and less developed countries remaining significantly less developed. It's impossible for me to believe that we can reduce CO2 levels and simultaneously provide 8 billion people with the lifestyle that Europe and the U.S. enjoy today.

Japan's wooden cube-shaped satellite rockets to space

I found a few sources saying that since wood is transparent to the radio frequencies used for communications, satellite antennas can be inside the body of the satellite rather than being unfurled outside, which is a simpler design. But that still doesn't make sense, unless it happens that wood is also opaque to the radiation that makes up damaging cosmic rays.

We know what Musk will probably dress up as this year: A victim

Re: ...tomfoolery afoot in Pennsylvania

The Republican party has just joined the Democrats as plaintiff in the lawsuit about the shenanigans in Erie County. Both parties suing the county board of elections five days before the election, in a swing county in a swing state, is *not* a sign that the system is working as intended.

The county clerk is blaming the problems on the out-of-state contractor who was hired to print and distribute the ballots, so it may be simple incompetence on the part of the low bidder for a government contract. But it's still very messed up, and both parties will have clear and obvious grounds for challenging the results of any close race in this county. (The county is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in terms of voter registration, with Democrats having a slim majority.)

Re: Hmm

The thing is, it's *not* overloaded compared to 2020. The number of mail-in ballots requested in Pennsylvania in 2024 was about 75% of the number in 2020, according to the Secretary of State in PA.

Re: Hmm

There is tomfoolery afoot in Pennsylvania. In addition to the incident in Bucks County (which resulted in a lawsuit by the Republican party, and hence the judicial override), we have:

-- Duplicate mail-in ballots sent to 300 voters in Erie County, and an additional 700 mail-in ballots delivered to the wrong local post offices, rendering them undeliverable until re-sorted;

-- Erie County clerk says they believe that even more ballots have probably been "misplaced" (her word), no other details given;

-- Hours-long lines at the Elections office in Erie County, full of people who didn't get their ballots, likely as a result of the above. The Democratic Party is suing the Erie County elections board to get more information about the overall situation (the chairman of the county elections board is a career politician, a Democrat);

-- 250 duplicate ballots sent to voters in Tioga County;

-- County election worker in Wilkes-Barre "discarded" at least 9 overseas military ballots (the worker has since been fired); 7 of the 9 had been opened and all 7 of them were Trump ballots;

-- Approximately 2,500 recent voter registrations (not ballots) in Lancaster County have been declared invalid; Lancaster County says that two other counties (which they did not name) have also seen numbers of suspicious registrations, which have also been invalidated.

These events have all been reported in mainstream local media, and are all based on information from the various county elections offices. I have to wonder how many other incidents have gone unreported.

Half the world's online via mobile, but growth is slowing

Re: Time to slow down and think...

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." -- Ed Abbey

Google Cloud burst by 12-hour power outage in German region

Re: Is It Possible ...?

To be fair, it's also true that only a limited number of people have the brainpower to build a set of on-prem systems that meet those requirements, and doing so is also pretty expensive.

Sorry, but the ROI on enterprise AI is abysmal

Ignoring your customers' opinions

... is unlikely to be a good strategy. Given a choice between chatting with an AI customer-service system and chatting with a human, what percentage of customers would choose AI? When you deliberately do something that your customers don't want, you have no right to expect a positive ROI.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be gone in ten years – for chump change

Re: Same old problem

> The problem is always the opportunity cost.

Yes. If you had $7.5 billion to spare and wanted to use it to "do good," cleaning up plastic would be one of the less rational ways to spend the money.

Big Tech got its 'next billion' – but there's three billion people still offline

Crisis averted

> If you empower three billion people with generators, we will have a climate crisis.

Thank heaven Gartner saw that coming! It would be terrible if all of "those people" caused a climate crisis by recharging their phones!

AGI is on clients' radar but far from reality, says Gartner

Re: Intelligence

If we ever do build something that can do AGI, I'm guessing that it won't achieve that in the same way that our brains do. Automobiles and submarines don't move like horses and fish do, and airplanes don't fly like birds do. We got useful airplanes only when people stopped saying "I want to build something that works like a bird" and started saying "I want to build a heavier-than-air craft that can fly," starting with a clean piece of paper.

But for AGI, what exactly is the goal? "I want to build a system that can.... do what?" In other words, if / when AGI arrives, how will we know? (Current systems can already pass the Turing test, so that's not a useful gauge anymore.)

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

> The problem doesn't really lie with the supersharers. They, presumably, believe the material they're posting, and they surely have the right to share their opinions with others, regardless of how bat shit crazy they are. Any society that seeks to limit the free expression of opinions - North Korea, anyone? - has already lost, and is not one I would want to be part of. Similarly, people must be free to read those opinions if they wish.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. And yes. The problem isn't these "supersharers," who are very few in number. It's the non-super readers who base their own opinions on what they read from random idiots on social media. The supersharers would not be an issue at all if nobody paid attention to them; and conversely, their followers would probably hold similarly ridiculous opinions even if the supersharers did not exist. Eliminating the supersharers would solve exactly nothing.

Put Rescuezilla 2.5 on a bootable key – before you need it

Alternatively...

> Then you're prepared for almost anything short of total disk failure.

Or you could just make sure you have proper, tested backups, in which case you're protected against even total disk failure.

Tesla nearing shareholder vote to grant Musk $46B

Right -- this isn't about what he "needs" -- it's about his value to the company, and how much is required in order to retain him.

FYI... Renewable energy sources behind 30% of the world's electricity in 2023

Electricity or energy?

> Wind, solar, hydro, other renewables, and nuclear together now make up 39.4 percent of the world's ***electricity*** supply. It might not be too much longer until most ***energy*** in the world is generated by low-carbon sources.

So are we talking about electricity, or about total energy (which includes electricity, plus other things like gasoline and diesel used for internal combustion engines, natural gas for heating, etc)?

Python, Flutter teams latest on the Google chopping block

Re: It's incredible

> Google is not there to make your life better, it is there to make PROFITS

Absolutely correct. Anyone who believes otherwise deserves what they get.

Meta's value plummets as Zuckerberg admits AI needs more time and money

Re: "investors are unwilling to wait too long"

> they're gambling addicts with access to vast amounts of other people's money

Or they're following the momentum and attempting to profit from other people's bandwagon mentality. That can be a good strategy as long as you don't get caught holding the bag when it starts to fall apart.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: My Bullshit Meter Just Exploded

Exactly. So if you're clever enough to get out before the inevitable crash occurs, then you could probably make money by buying the stock now. The trick will be knowing when to get out.

SpaceX workplace injury rates are rocketing

Re: No rockets, no accidents.

Yes -- I wonder where SpaceX would stand if OSHA measured injuries per launch.

Silicon Valley roundabout has drivers in a spin

Design goals

Here in Pennsylvania, the Department of Transportation has been installing roundabouts in the last few years. In every case that I know of, the locals complained after a few months when they noticed that the number of accidents was not decreasing. The DoT always replies that the goal isn't to reduce the actual number of accidents -- they concede that that number will probably be about the same as it was before the roundabout -- but to reduce the severity of accidents that do happen. And that does seem to be the case: there are still regular fender-benders, but fewer higher-speed crashes.

Devaluing content created by AI is lazy and ignores history

> Society is racing to the bottom. We're being drowned in content that is based on averages and statistics

Problem is that many people are quite happy with that sort of content. They're looking for entertainment, not for art.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Re: Presumably they were already 'getting' divorced

Yes, the BBC story says, "Mrs Williams applied for divorce in January 2023"

UN: E-waste is growing 5x faster than it can be recycled

Re: We don't hear you, the money is talking too loud

15 year old ThinkPad W500 here, with the hard disk swapped out for an SSD. It's my every-day machine and it does everything that I need it to do. It even survived an accidental coffee spill a couple of years ago. (Almost an entire cup, poured directly on the keyboard. I gave it two weeks to dry out, then it booted as though nothing had happened.)

I'm certain there are others here with even older machines.

It's so easy to blame "the rich" (or "the corporations") isn't it? Much easier than thinking about whether you yourself are contributing to the problem.

Re: We don't hear you, the money is talking too loud

Happily aided and abetted by "Everyone else should hold onto their old gadgets for 5 or 10 years, but I (me!) need the latest and shiniest, because I DESERVE IT and I'm the only thing that matters to me.

Reddit wants to raise $748M with IPO, sets value at $6.4B... and it has yet to turn a profit

Comparison

At $6.4 billion, Reddit would be worth roughly the same amount as Twitter / X. That sounds about right.

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

Re: Too late?

Flares travel at the speed of light, don't they? That 500 km/sec number sounds more like CME speed.

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

Doesn't sound right

For this to work, the battery capacity has to be larger than what the tower really needs for backup purposes, so the operator can afford to sell excess power back to the grid or to run from the batteries down when power is expensive. If I was the tower operator, I might be wondering why I was sold such an oversized battery in the first place. I might prefer to pay less for a smaller battery that can simply act as a traditional backup.

Neuralink patient masters mind-mouse maneuvers – if Musk is to be believed

Re: masters mind-mouse maneuvers

Mice? Mice are for wimps. José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado stopped a charging bull via a remotely controlled brain implant -- sixty years ago.

Wyze admits 13,000 users could have viewed strangers' camera feeds

Re: 'This represented around 0.25 percent of all users'

> If having the data inadvertently exposed is that important or distressing, don't expose it.

I wish I could give more than one thumbs-up for that...

Cybercriminals are stealing iOS users' face scans to break into mobile banking accounts

Given the prevalence of surveillance cameras in our society today, using a face scan for authentication is like writing your password on your forehead.

Volt Typhoon not the only Chinese crew lurking in US energy, critical networks

Re: Mutually Assured Destruction of Digital Systems (MADDS)?

Perhaps the Chinese want us to detect some of these intrusions. MAD can work as a deterrent only if your adversary knows for sure that you have potent weapons.

Hundreds of workers to space out from NASA's JPL amid budget black hole

Re: Adapt or die

Those "tight planning regulations" have an effect too. Standards are higher than they used to be, and that costs money. I couldn't legally rebuild the house I live in now -- it's a fine house but was built 50 years ago, and it would violate numerous aspects of the building code if re-built as-is. Same with other things -- it would not be possible to manufacture the truck that I owned 20 years ago, because it wouldn't meet current safety standards. A 20-year-old phone would be laughably inadequate now. And so on -- we're paying more for many things, but we're getting more too.

Computers though... wow. Orders of magnitude performance increases, at lower prices. (Although I am typing this on a 15-year-old Lenovo W500.)

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Re: How can a company be that bad...

That's probably true; the system is working as intended. Boeing screwed up, so the company is now under increased scrutiny from customers, regulators, the media, and shareholders. The extra scrutiny will continue until the Boeing re-earns the trust that has been lost. And deservedly so, as you said.

Space exploitation vs space exploration: Humanity has much to learn from the Voyager probes

>>"can we really afford to do all these things that go on for 10 – 20 years? [...]"

> Can we afford not to?

Yes, we can afford not to. I admire the Voyager project, but let's be honest: the economic return on investment is likely to be negative. It's still worth doing in my opinion, but asking about ROI for this kind of thing is like asking about ROI for an arts project. ROI is not why we do these things.

Investors threw 50% less money at quantum last year

Re: The way forward?

How bout AI running on quantum computers in the cloud, powered by renewable energy, and storing their results on a blockchain?

The next big thing is blockchain! Oh, wait, nevermind...

The next big thing is the metaverse! Oh, wait, nevermind...

The next big thing is quantum! Oh, wait, nevermind...

The next big thing is generative AI!...

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

Improvement?

> Tech companies might spend their time pushing the latest and greatest, however, the job posting is a reminder that not everyone is on the express train to modernization.

I have to wonder: in what way would Windows 11 be an improvement over Windows 3.11 for this use case? Other than "Windows 11 is still supported, and 3.11 is not"?

Robocaller spoofing Joe Biden is telling people not to vote in New Hampshire

Loophole

"Several states... have passed laws forbidding politicians from using deepfakes in election campaigns. The rules, however, are fuzzier when it comes to individuals using AI to create and distribute disinformation."

So it's illegal for Biden to use an AI avatar of himself as part of his campaign, but it's OK for someone else to use one as part of an anti-Biden disinformation campaign?

US cities are going to struggle to green up their act by 2050

Re: An "easy" fix

Depends on where you live. I'm in the northeastern U.S. Where I live, the sun has been (partially) visible on only two days in the last two weeks. And at the moment, my roof is covered in snow. Solar would be completely pointless here between from November through February, and it isn't that great in late fall or early spring either.

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

Alternative uses

I remember my thesis advisor talking about this possibility decades ago. He said that weaponization was a real concern: if you can beam a huge amount of energy from space to a ground station via microwaves, then you could probably also re-target that beam to other locations outside of your borders; leading to an arms race as soon as any one nation started work on such a system.