Posts by rajivdx

NASA engineers play space surgeon in bid to unclog Voyager 1's arteries

Re: Stunning engineering....

My brother had a very bad experience with Miele - purchased a top of the line induction cooktop from them for $7k. He was very happy with it till it broke down in 1.5 years. Took it back to Miele and they refused to fix it till he threatened to report them to the ACCC (Our consumer protection forum). They finally replaced it after 6 months - he had to manage with a portable stove until then. And guess what? The replacement cracked right down the middle after 6 months and Miele again refused to fix it till he threatened to go to the ACCC again.

In Australia it doesn't matter if a product is out of warranty - if it is a premium product you can reasonably expect it to last a long time. (That's why Apple has to offer a minimum 2 years warranty here)

(When I say refused above, it was not an outright refusal as that would be illegal in warranty - it was more like 'Maybe you dropped a piano on it - that's not covered'...)

Google paying to be default search on phones is totally against antitrust law, judge rules

What's your point?

The point here is that Google is _paying_ the likes of Apple, etc something to the tune of $70 ($18 bullion a year for around 250 million iPhones sold a year) a phone to put their search engine as default. And that is wrong.

If Google search is so good then they should let phone makers like Apple choose to include it by default rather than having to pay them. This stifles innovation as no matter what the competition (Bing, Yahoo, Duck Duck Go, etc) do, they cannot get their search engine in the door as they cannot match the $70 payment that Google is making, so they give up trying to innovate their product. As a result Google has no competition and they don't bother to improve their product focusing instead to make the search results lousy so you have to see more ads to find the result you are looking for.

That is what this antitrust case is about.

CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor also linked to Linux kernel panics and crashes

Re: Gluttons for punishment

Mmmm... Windows has a specific AV API that allows 3rd party AV code to run in less privileged levels and yet monitor the system for malware activity. However as Dave Plummer explains, CS explicitly worked around this by writing their code as a driver so it ran in ring 0, AND loading external invalidated code into the privileged executable environment. The first was bad, but the second takes the biscuit for incompetent and reckless programming.

Techie invented bits of the box he was fixing, still botched the job

Re: "stay away from magnets"

All mechanical quartz watches have a magnetic rotor which is spun around every 1 second by an electromagnet. The electromagnet is very weak or else it would drain your battery in no time. So if you exposed the watch to a strong magnetic field, the rotor will align with the magnetic field and the electromagnet will bot be able to make it budge -resulting in the second hand making half hearted attempts to move from a stuck position.

This may affect windup watches too if they have too many ferromagnetic moving parts - of course digital watches are unaffected.

IMF boss warns of AI 'tsunami' coming for world's jobs

Re: Basic income?

The big worry will be that with few big companies like OpenAI holding all our AI models, the Googleification of our models will be inevitable. It won't be long before someone will say 'hey we have all this training data and models trained by this poor sod our customer, why don't we take that knowledge and offer customers pretrained models ready to go from day one.' - and there goes all the hard work and IP of the early adopters. It will be worse than the Silicon Valley brain drain - you won't even be able to offer your models a higher pay to get them to stay.

Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness

Re: Security through incompetence

It's easy to blame MS, but I think NT4.0 was an awesome product - probably their best yet considering the time it was released in. They had the foresight to support multiple architectures (x86, Itanium, Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, PowerPC) - and they supported emulation of x86 DOS applications, Win16 and Win32 applications using WoW. Remember other companies like Apple would just ditch the previous architecture completely - AFAIK you could not even run OS9 apps from OSX.

NT4.0 was so well architected that you could even compile a version of Linux (CoLinux) to run natively on top of NT Kernel without emulation.

Sadly MS dropped all the other architectures with WinXP and had to do it all over again with Windows 10.

Most of the problems with NT had to do with GUI components and libraries imported from Win95 as they were developed to a much lower standard.

Japan may join UK/US/Australia defense-oriented AI and quantum alliance

JAUKUS?

How a single buck bought bragging rights in the battle to port Windows 95 to NT

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

For a business $100 for a Windows license is nothing compared to how much they would have to pay for a full time IT support guy to manage their Linux systems - believe me, I've spent weeks trying to configure Linux servers myself rather than hiring someone to do it for me. I did learn a lot, but businesses aren't doing it so their employees can learn these skills on their time.

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

It's still not intuitive - try it with multiple monitors and it is all over the shop.

Full disclosure - I have a Mac Studio. Windows just seems to be much better at the productive stuff, not the cool stuff. You can switch between 2 windows cutting and pasting from a Word Document/website into a spreadsheet so fast in Windows while a Mac ponders over it every time you switch apps.

Re: Windoze NEVER worked well.

Correct! WindowsNT would run for months without a reboot on good well supported hardware. Remember these OS's were used on all kinds of hardware and Microsoft couldn't write drivers for every one of them. If you used shitty hardware with shitty drivers expect your OS to crash on the slightest whim. Windows95 of course was a different story - a dodgy CD in the CDROM drive or a bad sector on your floppy was enough to stall the 'OS'.

Linux only fared better as all the drivers for Linux were built into it and not written by crappy 3rd party developers. If the hardware wasn't supported - tough luck.

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

Re: That seems a little extreme

Just to clarify:

1. The new laws do not ban your employer from emailing, texting or calling you after hours - it gives you the right to ignore them unless your job requires you to. For example if you're a paramedic or fireman on call.

2. The intent of the law is that if you do any work after hours, you should get paid for it. Your boss canot expect to call you on the weekend and have you do unpaid work - you can choose to answer the call and do the work if you wish to, or you can choose to ignore the call/email/text unless your contract requires you to act on them.

3. Your employer will not be jailed for sending you a text message. They will only get penalized if they fire you or otherwise punish/reprimand you for not answering your phone/email/text after hours when your contract does not require you to. If that happens you can report your employer and they will be banned from contacting you after hours, and if they persist then they will be penalized which may include jail time.

4. The law is expected to be amended so point 3 above is no longer a criminal offense, but they can still be fined.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Umm... Forth gets compiled into machine code.

If its machine code is more compact than your machine code then it just means you're writing crappy machine code.

I remember when I was writing assembly/machine code, we would use techniques like XORing a register with itself to zero it rather than loading 0 which took up more space - modern compilers all use tricks like this.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Re: "Yes, I could buy an ad-free version, but why should I?"

Nope it wont.

Microsoft even said Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows ever - and then they went back on their promise.

Now Windows 10 nags you to update to Windows 11 and threatens to go end of life soon.

Windows 11 is the most pointless OS ever, I don't know why it is needed. They have crippled and removed so many features and have gone back to the Windows 7 feature set pretty much.

AWS plays with Fire TV Cube, turns it into a thin client for cloudy desktops

Re: shuttle to mission control SAY AGAIN

We've logged everything in for you, but we shipped it to the wrong address...

Re: only 15 years ?

It's not an XT if it's diskless... :p

Apple exec defends 8GB $1,599 MacBook Pro, claims it's like 16GB in a PC

Re: Insult to injury

No MacOS is not more frugal than most.

No ARM architecture is not more compact than x86.

The one place where x86 really shone was in code size as it had all the legacy crap that required single byte instructions etc - which made everything else so complex and cumbersome.

Windows due to the amount of low end PC's it needs to run on has been optimised to be as frugal with RAM as possible.

And you can't control the users - they will keep opening as many Chrome tabs as they can. And a Chrome tab will take pretty much the same amount of memory on a Mac or anything else.

And yes I have an M1 Mac Studio, and it runs Windows in a VM faster than it runs MacOS.

CEO Satya Nadella thinks Microsoft hung up on Windows Phone too soon

No sh!it Sherlock!

Windows Phone was probably the best phone OS out there when it came to intuitiveness, ease of use consistency and code size.

Android is a sh!t show full of spam and spyware (Thanks Google!).

iOS is is bulky as hell with copies of resources for every iOS phone out there - simple apps are hundreds of MB in size compared to the same apps on Windows Phone which are 10's of MB. iOS is now following what Windows Phone did with XAML with its new declarative UI.

Slowly Windows Phone features are trickling down to Android and iOS devices. What let Windows Phone down was poor developer support and under powered hardware - both of which we can blame Microsoft for.

Lightning struck: Apple switches to USB-C for iPhone 15 lineup

Re: "can reach out for help when there's no cell signal coverage over satellite connections"

It's been there since iPhone 14 Pro and it works. You can even test it out in settings where it scans for the satellite.

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

Re: A lot of people in the comments acting like someone pissed in their cereal this morning

If they found a stick on Mars, i don't think they'll have a lot more to be excited about than poking a probe with it!

China floats strict screentime limits and content crimps for kids

Re: Microsoft have been floating parental controls also...

Umm... Microsoft sends emails to both the parents and the kids. This is good because the kids know exactly what their parents are being told - namely how long, what apps, what websites and what they searched for on google. Works like a treat across all Microsoft devices including the now defunct phone. Microsoft has experience doing this for almost 30 years with Active Directory and their implementation is somewhat better than Apple and Google's.

Apple particularly has lots of loopholes, where my 8 year old found that if she puts Youtube into card view, she can continue to watch videos for hours and hours bypassing any time limits - she also found she could access camera and photos from always allowed apps like iMessage simply by trying to attach an image.

Google's implementation is the worst I have seen.

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

Re: Voyager 1 & 2

It's still the same technology - what have we invented since the 1970's that wasn't invented for Voyager? Its still the same transistors, same radio technology, we have actually regressed in space technology since then and stuff isn't built to last anymore. All our advances in software technology were developed to support the space program.

All that has happened since then is that transistors have gotten smaller and faster as a result. More transistors means more complexity, but that increased complexity is not doing anything useful these days just running fancy graphics on our fancy phones and introducing more bugs.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Hit the 'X' button, no no, not that X...

Slackware wasn't the first Linux distro, but it's the oldest still alive and kicking

Re: Thanks for the memories

Haha! You knew you were in trouble if LILO got stuck at 'LI'...

Microsoft's Surface Pro 9 requires a tedious balancing act

I guess the Author is missing the point of the Surface Pro

Looks like what the author really needs is a bog standard laptop. The surface pro has a very specific use case:

1. It is a tablet that you can carry around and use like an iPad when on the move. If you have a table to use it on then flip out the kickstand, place it on the table and work away. If not, fold the keyboard away and use it as a tablet.

2. It is a workstation, when at your desk, dock it and use it in all its glory as a full blown workstation with your huge monitor and comfortable keyboard. It is a no compromises machine - no running only tablet apps and 1 or 2 apps at a time.

I also found that it is an extremely sturdy machine. My son has smashed every chromebook and laptop I got him in school. When I went to look for a Macbook Air for him at high school - the one on display at the shop had a warning posted on it not to touch the screen or it will break. I was sure if I got the Macbook Air he will break the screen within 1 week of having it, so I got him a surface Pro since.

In the last 5 years he has had 2 Surface Pro's and both survived the abuse. I hear them fall off his table with a thud regularly - and when that happens the keyboard just comes off and the charge cable detaches saving the joint which would otherwise break on a regular laptop. The tablet itself is built like a brick and can take immense abuse and the screen does not crack from just being dropped (Got a bumper case of course). He is on his second surface pro after the first one's battery gave way after 5 years of abuse.

So, get a surface pro if you are on the move and need a sturdy no compromises machine (If you are just browsing the web and Youtube - get an iPad). I also use Thinkpads which are extremely sturdy and have a nice keyboard, but can't be used as tablets (Yoga != Thinkpad).

Indian telecoms leaps from 2G, to 4G, to 6G – on a single day

Re: 640K is enough for anyone

This whole 5G/6G requirement is driven by the exponential increase in RAM which then leads to developers "may as well use as much as we can rather than craft something non memory hungry" attitude which leads to bloated apps that need more memory and more bandwidth to download them - hence the need for 5G and 6G going forward. Do you know that the Facebook app on the App store is now 400MB in size, so you need a very fast 5G connection to download it in under a minute? The same app was under 25MB 10 years ago, and not much new has been added since.

Five billion phones are dead in drawers – carriers want to mine them

Or charge a tax on new phones, say 10% of the cost of the new phone if you don't turn in an old phone in exchange. So that $1000 iPhone could end up costing $1100 if you don't trade in your old phone.

On top of that you could still offer them money for the trade in (if the trade-in is worth something). So if you trade in a relatively new iPhone 12 for an iPhone 14, you get $100 off the iPhone 14 plus say $200 for the trade in - that should be incentive enough.

Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits

Re: For once, Trudeau's government has made an actual smart move.

India has 1/6th of the worlds population and produces 25% of the worlds engineers.

So why are they taking up 75% of the H1-B intake of the US? Consider this, of the remaining 75% of the worlds engineers, most are happy where they are - UK, Germany, US, etc. Most of the engineers produced by India want to migrate to the US. And the remaining peoples of the world who want to migrate to the US, most do not possess the necessary qualifications to migrate under the H1-B scheme. Hence majority of the H1-B slots go to India. India realized a long time ago that education is key and parents started shoving their kids into Engineering colleges whether they liked it or not (hence the poorer quality of the stock). The rest of the world has realized this a bit late and are now playing catch up.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

Re: Eurpean format numbers?

At my last company I developed a medical device (Google it: OneStim) running Windows CE (2013), some snazzy XAML graphics, SQLite, WiFi, touchscreen, the lot. The whole thing fit in 20MB of Flash. Yes you read that right: Windows with XAML graphics in 20MB, not GB.

We opted to go with XAML because it was so light and snazzy compared to QT which was a real pig at 400MB.

Unfortunately Windows CE is no more (R.I.P) and XAML is following closely on its heels.

Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple

Re: 15W charging is "too slow"?

You may not use your phone much (I fall into that category too), but there are people who are on the move all the time, taking Zoom calls on their phone, typing out emails, reports and PowerPoint presentations. These people may have only half an hour in an airport lounge to get their phone from 5% to 80% battery in time for their next long-haul flight. So, for these people 15W charging is not enough. These people have a choice with Lightning/USB-C to charge faster, but if Apple removes all physical ports, then they have no option at all. And that is why, faster and more efficient wireless charging standards are important - you specifically may not need it, but a lot of other people do.

Women sue Apple claiming AirTags helped their stalkers

Re: No iPhome ==No stalking

Ummm... no iPhone means you can be stalked without your knowledge. The AirTag will still use the nearest available iPhone to locate and report its location. This will not be detected as stalking as the AirTag is not consistently associated with any 1 iPhone. The point you made is valid only if you live in the middle of nowhere with no iPhones for the AirTag to reach out to, but in a city you'll easily pass an iPhone on the road or public transport.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

I call bullshit!

Inkjet printers are very lucrative for printer manufacturers as you need to continuously replace the ink cartridges whether you use the printer or not. If you leave the printer plugged in then it will do a 'self clean' every day and squirt ink into the *surprise surprise* ink pad. And this results in 2 things:

1. You run out of ink whether you use the printer of not - a regular income stream for the manufacturer.

2. Your printer bricks itself due to a full ink pad requiring you to purchase a new printer - more money for the manufacturer.

If you try to leave the printer unplugged for extended periods of time then the nozzles get blocked with dried ink requiring you to either purchase a new printer or new cartridges (if the nozzles are on the cartridge)

I found myself replacing ink every 3 months on my inkjet printer even though I rarely used it.

If you sparingly use your printer then a Laser is a lot more economical as:

1. It consumes next to no power just sitting there - no periodic cleaning, nothing.

2. You can turn it off for years and it won't get clogged.

3. It consumes no toner if you don't print anything.

I now replace the toner in my laser printer once in 2 years.

And guess what, if you do a lot of printing the Laser printer is still economical as 1 toner cartridge will print around 5000 pages on Laser compared to around 500 on inkjet. Yes, Laser consumes more electricity printing - if that concerns you go on a 100% renewable energy plan.

There is a reason why you can buy an inkjet printer for $20 - to suck you into the ecosystem where you continuously have to fork out money for cartridges assuring a regular income to the manufacturers.

Moon has been drifting away from Earth for 2.4 billion years, rocks reveal

Or the moon reaches a Lagrange point and the Earth and Moon get tidally locked to the sun and rotating once every year - whatever the year may be at that point of time.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

Re: Never mind 1-2-3

Umm... Epson still has a support page for the LX-300 where you can buy consumables and download drivers for:

https://www.epson.com.au/products/dotmatrix/lx300_Consumables.asp

Only Microsoft can give open source the gift of NTFS. Only Microsoft needs to

Re: Using NTFS

ExFAT has a journaling version called TexFAT, but journaling works only on supported OS's like Windows CE, on all other OS's it looks like plain ExFAT.

All FAT versions including FAT32, FAT16 and FAT12 had 2 FAT's. If the drive was pulled out before the transaction was completed then the FAT's did not match and the OS could attempt to 'roll back' the drive to the last known good state.

Mars Ingenuity helicopter and Perseverance are talking again

Didn't they think of putting a little 'helipad' on Percy so Ingenuity could ride on Percy's back during the cold winter months?

Apple hit with another faulty hardware lawsuit – this time it's the Watch

Re: Apple's not alone...

For a watch that is designed to discharge over 10 to 16 hours, 1C IS a high rate of discharge - so the original premise is wrong as I doubt that there are any apps or conditions under which a watch will discharge in an hour.

A phone or laptop can discharge at 1C while playing a game, but it gets extremely hot doing so.

For a power tool or a Dyson Vacuum which is designed to chug through the entire battery capacity in about 6 minutes, 10C is considered a nominal discharge rate.

So, what is high or not depends on the design and application of the battery. For a watch, 1C is definitely a high discharge rate.

Apple's Mac Studio exposed: A spare storage slot and built-in RAM

Re: Reasonably priced Mac Pro

> PC laptops are about 3 years tops

You obviously haven't heard of Thinkpads - I have 7 of various ages and all are still going strong with the oldest being 18 years old and running the geriatric XP. All have been abused, thrown about, sat on, rained on, spilled on and not coddled in glass cases the way Macs are.

Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail? DOS error

Re: because MS-DOS was "heavily inspired" by 70s CP/M

> Maybe that's why NT version numbering starts at 3.1 in 1993?

It went like this:

Windows 1.0 -> Windows 2.0 -> Windows 3.0 -> Windows 3.1 -> Windows 95 -> Windows 98 -> Windows ME -> Trash

Windows NT 3.51 (Kernel build from Scratch, apps/shell from Windows 3.1) -> Windows NT 4.0 (NT Kernel, apps/shell from Windows 95) -> Windows 2000 -> Windows XP -> Windows Vista -> Windows 7 -> Windows 10 -> Windows 11

Google advises Android users to be careful of Microsoft Teams if they want to call 911

Re: Time to lawyer up?

I am sure a company like Google can afford to setup a 'test 4G network' within their premises with a test 911 number that testers can spam without being frowned upon.

I know we had our own 'Test broadcast network' for testing satellite TV products without real customer devices going titsup in the event of a faulty command being sent.

Indian government warns locals not to use Starlink's internet services

Re: Anonymous Coward = Anonymous Troll

Exactly! India, like China wants to control and snoop on its 'subjects'. A satellite based Internet service that can bypass such snoopery? 'Heavens no! Shut it down! How will we shut down dissent over farmers and Kashmir?'

Microsoft makes tweaks to Windows 11 Start Menu for Insiders but stops short of mimicking Windows 10

Re: previous versions

I totally agree, I think dropping tiles was a bad idea - we have gone back to the 90's era of having static bitmap icons. If you don't like tiles don't use it, just pick the smallest size and it behaves like a boring icon. Those of us who don't want to spend our days opening every app to see if there is a message for us just use a large tile and get the info we need at a glance.

I don't like how Windows 8 forced tiles and modern UI down our throats, but Windows 10 achieved a good balance between the classic UI and the 'modern' UI. I feel we have gone backwards with W11.

The return of the turbo button: New Intel hotness causes an old friend to reappear

Yes, I remember that. It would correctly set the Turbo LED, but PC-Cases with the 7 segment display would still show the incorrect speed as they were hardcoded to the turbo button.

Re: I use the Scroll Lock at least weekly....

Cool! I didn't realize Ping could do that. It seems ping treats ^C and Ctrl-Scroll Lock differently, the former breaks the latter continues.

The second use that you found in Excel is the *actual* function and reason for existence of scroll lock - hence the name. Excel is one of the last apps to still use Scroll lock this way.

Intel told by jury to pay $2.18bn to VLSI for ripping off two semiconductor patents

Re: Don't know about the others, but

That's the thing about patents - it sounds obvious once someone else has done it. That's why you need to patent it.

How about the IBM cursor? Very obvious now isn't it? Wasn't so back in those days till IBM did it.

Splunk junks 'hanging' processes, suggests you don't 'hit' a key: More peaceful words now preferred in docs

Re: Grandfathered?

I think that we have forgotten that this happened. Unless we had this discussion today - I would have never realized the racist origins of the term 'grandfathered'.

So, it is good that these terms are being highlighted and removed or they will just become part of the language while causing pain to a small minority who still remember their origins.

India's demand to identify people on chat apps will 'break end-to-end encryption', say digital rights warriors

Just do a hash of the message text and it works if you cut and paste it too. It will break if you modify it but at least they can track it back to you, identify the source of your message and then track it on.

For this system to work they will need access to 1 message in the chain - usually someone who infiltered the group or someone who was offended by the message and reported it. Once you have that you can track the chain to its source and get a warrant for that person and then repeat the process after examining their phone to track their source.

It seems like a workable solution that does not break encryption - not that I support it.

Microsoft backs Australia’s pay-for-news plan, risks massive blowback over a lousy $3bn and change

Re: short termist

Oh yes, we will!

I have DuckDuckGo and Bing as my search engines. Have an iPhone with no Google apps. The iPhone is crap compared to Windows Phone (RIP) and Android, but it does not track me as intrusively as Google does. I would love to get off GMail as well, but for now have to make do with fetching my Gmail on Outlook.

I appreciate that companies need advertising to make money for content they offer for free. I appreciate that some profiling is needed to offer targeted ads. I appreciate the need to track my location for features like FindMyPhone. But why does Google need to track my location even when I put my phone in 'Flight Mode'? Why do they need to interpret my location data like 'walking', 'running', 'entering a vehicle', 'exiting a vehicle', etc? This is extremely intrusive.

20+ years ago when I started using Google, I never thought they will become the evil they are today.

Re: I am confused ...

I agree, previews should be paid form.

Hyperlinks that look the same as other search results should not be paid for - this is how Google was 15 years ago. Search brought up news articles just as regular search results.

I recon anything that appears on Google News should be paid for. Google scrapes so much information that you don't need to click through to get a summary of what's happening in the world today. I think that is a problem for most news sites.

That said, instead of having a dialog with government and news sites to debate what should be payable and what not, Google has decided to use their clout to throw intrusive ads at people who land on their search page and arm twisting us with threats to leave the country. You know what? Pack up and go Google - we've had enough.

I've been using DuckDuckGo for a while - its very good on privacy but has usability issues - most annoyingly not being able to navigate back from a link. i am using Bing now, and its really good, a very usable alternative to Google, particularly for news.

Re: now openly admitted

Who initiated this legislation?

Rupert Murdoch.

India shows off new home-grown CPU – but at 100MHz, 32-bit and 180nm, it’s a bit of a clunker

Nothing to see here...

This is a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The Indian government might be beating its drum about a 'new' CPU they have developed - but this is certainly not the first time a new CPU has been developed in India or by an Indian. The Intel Pentium processor was developed by an Indian. I myself designed a 32 bit processor and implemented a scaled down 16bit version for my University project 24 years ago. It was implemented with off the shelf 74LS series TTL chips only on stacks of 5 vero boards (didn't have access to technology to make my own boards then) and ran at a blistering 1MHz. Even did an IDE for developing and debugging assembly code in Turbo Pascal - complete with single stepping, breakpoints and watchpoints. I had a friend who developed his own CPU cores in VHDL.

So, in short it is an absolute embarrassment when the Indian government toots its own horn about this 'achievement'.