Posts by DugEBug

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

Re: Ah.

Ah - another reason to keep my old car. It's getting harder to find points and caps for it though.

Parler games: Social network for internet rejects sues Amazon Web Services for pulling plug on hosting

Re: The bigger picture

Great summary. We need only look at what the collusion of 'big railroad' and 'big oil' did at the turn of the last century to see that the same action needs to happen today with 'big tech'.

Sadly, Biden is no Teddy Roosevelt.

Jeff Bezos tells shareholders to buckle up: Amazon to blow this quarter's profits and more on coronavirus costs

Re: Antichrist

Other than the overly large head, et is pretty cool too.

Rewriting the checklists: 50 years since Apollo 13 reported it 'had a problem' – and boffins saved the day

Apollo in Real Time

For those who want to re-live the experience, check out https://apolloinrealtime.org/

The site is incredible as it gives you the ability to experience the mission through synchronized audio and video as it unfolded. The Apollo 11 and 17 missions are available too.

For the folks who put this website together, thank you.

This must have taken an incredible amount of time to do, so it must have been a labor of love. Again, thank you.

Boeing 787s must be turned off and on every 51 days to prevent 'misleading data' being shown to pilots

Re: How long does it take to reboot a 787 ?

First, you have to switch SCE to AUX.

US and China wave white flags, hit pause button on trade war

Re: China hasn't "caved".

Thank you for your very eloquent use of CNN's talking points.

Gospel according to HPE: And lo, on the 32,768th hour did thy SSD give up the ghost

Hypothesis: Wear-leveling bug

The flash chips in the SSDs wear out due to writing. To mitigate this, the firmware tries to spread out writes such that all of the pages in the flash get roughly the same number of writes over time. This means that there is a lot of data movement in the SSD even when it isn't actively being read from/written to. A flash page that was written once and never deleted could be moved to a different location so that new writes can use the relatively youthful page. Similarly, pages that are deleted are eventually placed in a sorted 'free list' according to the number of writes that have already taken place.

As you can imagine, there is a heck of a lot of housekeeping going on inside that SSD - all executed according to the active firmware. If we imagine that the 'hour counter' is an integral part of the wear-leveling algorithm, havoc will be wreaked once the counter goes negative. The once properly organized lists/tables/etc. will suddenly be corrupted beyond repair. When the SSD driver asks for block XYZ, the SSD returns block WTF. There goes your file system, and your otherwise nice day.

HP to hike upfront price of printer hardware as ink biz growth runs dry

Re: My HP Cartridges and Printer certainly ended up in Landfill.

Similar problem here - only I didn't move. Same result though (see 'region coding' post in this forum).

Region coding

There's another lawsuit going on concerning region coding. I had (past tense) an HP printer for which I bought some genuine HP replacement inks from a reputable retailer (Amazon). Turns out, those cartridges were region coded for the EU. No problem - my printer continued to function happily until my next resupply. These ones were region coded for the US. Switching regions twice apparently triggered some firmware that bricked the printer. After hours on the phone with HP support, and after installing new firmware and entering numerous magic codes into the front panel, the printer remained bricked. The support person said I'd have to buy a new printer.

I did, and it wasn't (and never will be) an HP.

Two years later, my new Brother MFC printer is working great and I'm only on my second set of (significantly lower priced) cartridges.

Researchers studying Facebook's impact on democracy decry lack of data access, warn: We'll walk...

Re: A bulletin board ate my election

I'm not sure if I should upvote or downvote your post - so I'll just comment. It is unlikely that FB impacted the outcome of the election, but I'd be surprised if there weren't some people who went to the polls instead of staying home, or who changed their vote due to some fake news posted by a 'friend'.

When there are enough airheads out there who can't think for themselves - and our schools are producing them in mass quantities, then fake news from the platform of-the-day will impact the outcome.

Democracy isn't something that is deserved, it is something that is earned and must be protected. Sadly, the boomers have done a piss-poor job of protecting it.

Airbus A350 software bug forces airlines to turn planes off and on every 149 hours

Re: What is overflowing?

It's what happens when you flush an overloaded toilet, but that's not important right now.

RIP Leslie Nielsen

The Empire Strikes Back: Trump discovers $10bn JEDI cloud deal may go to nemesis Jeff Bezos, demands probe

Not a public cloud, methinks

Reading some older articles concerning this project, it seems to me that this is about Amazon/Microsoft/etc. defining and building the HW/SW infrastructure for a private cloud that has 'technical parity' with the commercial cloud. It would be deployed in DoD datacenters and be maintained by the contract winner(s).

If this is the case, then it may make sense to have a single winner. It also makes sense for the finalists to be Amazon or Microsoft because they have the most mature infrastructure for this sort of thing.

Just like a fighter/drone/ship project, there will be many winners. Intel, Dell, Samsung, Cisco, Mellanox, Nvidia come to mind, not to mention the software providers whose applications and operating systems will be run on this private cloud.

Has NASA's Mars Insight lander hit rock bottom? Heat probe struggles to penetrate Red Planet

A friend of mine has a beautiful swimming pool with a car-sized boulder in the center. When they were excavating for the pool and they encountered this beast they had to make a decision - dynamite it, fill the hole back in and forget the whole thing, or build the pool around it. They chose the latter, and now have a very unique design with a nice centerpiece from which to dive.

'Numpty new boy' lets the boss take fall for mailbox obliteration

Re: 100% honesty 90% of the time

An extra upvote for teaching me a new (and very useful) word!

New York judge blocks FBI demand for Apple help to unlock iPhone

Re: What happens if ???

Wouldn't it be easier for the FBI to reverse engineer the OS so as to take out the part that wipes the phone after 10 failed password attempts? Then they could 'guess' the password ad infinitum...

Chicago cops under fire for astonishingly high dashcam, mic failures

Blues Brothers

I immediately went to another scene in that movie:

Elwood: "I bet these cops got SCMODS"

Jake: "SCMODS"?

Elwood: "State County Municpal Offender Data System"

Cop (with a functional SCMODS): "That license plate is like a rash all over the computer!"

Verizon now owns AOL, so AOL now owns your web browsing habits, other personal info

Surprised

I haven't gotten a floppy disk from AOL in years. I thought they had gone out of business.

Today's Groupon offer to its sacked employees: 100% off your salary

Is this the same Groupon that...

...turned down a $6B offer from Google?

Oops.

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

Re: This is just wrong

I for one, would not mind having brand new kidneys - and I'd be willing to donate some skin cells to get it started. Have others researchers been trying to grow organs that don't have this ethical dilemma?

Re: Do vat grown brains dream?

Of course it is "plugged into" some things. You can't grow any living tissue without a supply of nutrients and oxygen. The way to do it is with a supply of blood that is somehow sustained via all the sensors, cleansing machines and the like. I suspect that maybe the skin donor is also the blood donor. The article leaves all of this to the imagination, unfortunately.

Snowball spud gun shows comets could have seeded Earth with life

Thank you Doctor for noticing the statement from the article that has been largely ignored. Which is more likely - getting peptides by slamming a comet onto the Earth or getting DNA from a few peptides that have been blasted into existence by said impact?

Texas senator Ted Cruz serves up sizzling 'machine gun bacon'

Re: He's Canadian. Born in Calgary

Great to see that the 'birthers' are bipartisan.

Just ONE THOUSAND times BETTER than FLASH! Intel, Micron's amazing claim

NUMA, not SSD

There is little point in putting this new NVM technology on an SSD or any other I/O device. I/Os are too slow and too high latency to take advantage of this technology. Instead, it should be put on the memory bus and treated as slow memory. Intel will need to build a new memory bus, or Micron will need to make DIMMs with hybrid DRAM/NVM.

The 'revolution' that this technology enables will only be realized when the programming paradigm changes. Is there an OS out there that can handle non-uniform memory access efficiently? Is there a programming language out there that can begin to help engineers write code with multiple classes of memory, including NVM?

A LOT of stuff needs to be re-thought/rewritten. Better get started - big bucks await those who succeed.

Did climate change scare off vegan dinos for millions of years? 'Yes'

Re: Last I checked

Let's not scream climate change quite so quickly.

The Western states have been experiencing wet/dought/fire cycles for a very long time. One reason that recent fires have been so out of control is due to human-caused fire suppresion. This leads to an unnatural vegetation build-up - leading to bigger/badder fires. Realizing the mistakes of the past, the forest services frequently conduct controlled burns to mitigate this. Norther Mexico has pretty much the same climate and does not experience fires of the same sort is because they tend to let them burn until they run out of fuel.

Electrons ride huge plasma tubes above Earth

Graduate student?

The article begins by saying that Cleo is a graduate student. Later, there is a quote: "As an undergraduate student with no prior background in this, that is an impressive achievement.”

It is impressive either way, but it would be good to know whether Cleo is working on her Ph.D thesis, or her senior project.

The rare metals debate: Only trace elements of sanity found

The map is missing Californium because it fell into the sea. (sorry).

Hardcore creationist finds 60-million-year-old fossils in backyard ... 'No, it hasn’t changed my mind about the Bible'

Re: From a proud Bible thumper

Yes, it does take a lot of faith to believe in a sefl-existent person who creating something amazingly complex out of nothing. It also takes a lot of faith to believe that nothing became something for no apparent reason other than sheer accident - and that sheer accidents continued to happen for billions of years, ultimately resulting in the most complex object in the known universe (the human brain).

Neither can be explained or proven using the scientific method, so faith is involved in either case.

Re: mental illness...

""Resource conservation? Recycling? What's the point of that, God is going to end the world soon."

Funny how the people most likely to pick up their trash and to avoid wasting money/resources are those who believe in God. They also use those resources without guilt because they don't worship the creation. Its here for us to use - but they (me inclusive) want to be good stewards of what He created.

From a proud Bible thumper

Yes, I'm one of them-thar Right-Wing Bible Thumpin' nut-jobs that most El Reg reader loathe and love to ridicule...

My God is a God of Truth. Since He invented gravity and everything else, He's not afraid to have us take a good look at His creation. In fact, He gave us a creative mind that wants to discover and try to understand everthing around us. I don't see any reason He would make a 4000 year-old fossil appear to be millions of years old. If it is a million years old, He'd make it look a million years old! He's not trying to deceive us, because that is not in His nature.

So let's keep trying to discover how it all works and where it all came from - without bias. I believe that the more we know, the more we will realize how amazing He is and how small we are.

This is of course, my humble opinion, and I can't prove my point any more than you can prove that “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be." (Rest in Peace, Carl).

OK - I'm braced for the barrage of hate-speech that will come from all you folks who think that my belief that there is such a thing as Truth is in itself, hate-speech. Let 'er rip!

EXTREME FEEDING: BLUE whales' gluttonous gobbling of fishy fluids

Re: Rubber-band nerve lets them gulp straight down throats

I was waiting for someone to equate this with the special nerve that exists in humans for a brief time during their early adulthood. It is mostly utilized to win beer guzzling contests in college dorm parties.

ALIENS ARE COMING: Chief NASA boffin in shock warning

Re: fund nasa fund

...and by the time we find out that these planets are completely sterile, the heads of NASA will be fully retired, enjoying their nice beach-front mansions at taxpayer's expense. Then the next generation of NASA leaders will say "But if we spend even more, we are certain that we'll find something interesting".

EMC and Cloudera withdraw from Indiana big data event

Have your cake - and eat it

No new laws are required. Since free speech is protected, the baker can simply hand over the perfectly crafted and delicious wedding cake, followed by "Enjoy the cake and have a wonderful marriage knowing that someday you'll burn in hell."

Boffins build Cyborg beetles, fly them by remote control

But they do know where it is going - to the nearest bright light.

ALIEN LIFE drenched in HOT FLUID on Jupiter's Ganymede – is that so?

Re: Why?

How can anything complex grow in an environment that is buried below miles of ice? Where do all the other necessities of complex life come from?

Google's chief finance officer quits to go backpacking

Re: Glum

@Champ - My situation is similar - no retirement in sight. As an employee, I'm limited to backpacking 2-weeks/year. Retiring while I can still carry a backpack for long distances would be sweet. So many mountains, and so little time.

Boffins find Earth's earliest Homo in Ethiopian hilltop

Transitional

Why is this a transitional object? Wouldn't something that is transitional be a pig who had toes?

Net neutrality secrecy: No one knows what the FCC approved (BUT Google has a good idea)

Regulations and Freedom

When was the last time any government regulations on private businesses resulted in more freedom for the people? As soon as you get regulators trying to 'save the middle class', you get big companies willing to help them with their regulations. When the big companies are really helpful (with unrelated contributions, of course), the regulations tend to favor them. Net neutrality is no different. It sounds good... "Neutrality is goood, favioritism is baaaad. We need the government to protect us from those evil corporations". So, politician A gets together with CEO B, and they meet with Bureaucrat C, and so the process begins...

I beg the government to STOP trying to help me!

Hoping for spy reforms? Jeb Bush, dangerously close to being the next US prez, backs the NSA

Re: Family business

Or from husband to wife.

Amazon's delivery drones shot down by new FAA rules

Dang - the FAA beat me to it!

I wanted to shoot them down myself.

Tearful boffins confirm grav wave tsunami NOT caused by Big Bang

Speaking for the 99.999% of us

I don't get it...

ALIEN fossils ON MARS: Curiosity snaps evidence of life

Re: Keep calm and look for alternate explanations

"But it's a bit premature to omit "possible" from the title, dontcha think?"

Indeed. I smell a general bias that says, "There MUST be life somewhere else, so let's go spend a lot of money finding it". The unbiased approach would be "There is a LOT we don't know about the universe, so let's go spend a lot of money learning more about it".

Survey: Tech has FREED modern workers – to work longer hours

Re: Inaccurate Statistics (Agreed chivo243)

Agree. As they say, there's lies, damned lies, and statistics...

How much of the increase in productivity is due to software applications rather than the internet?

In my line of work (digital design), my productivity has increased immensely from my early days of drawing NAND gates on a sheet of paper. Most of that increase has to do with offline software and more powerful computers, not the Internet.

I'll give the Internet a little credit for 'allowing' me to take my work home with me and for allowing me to stay up late at night to have WebEx meetings with co-workers and angry customers overseas.

This week it rained in San Francisco and the power immediately blew out. Your tech utopia

The best part of Silicon Valley

...is that I can get there in 1-hour on Southwest Airlines, take care of business, and go home.

Obama HURLS FCC under train, GUTPUNCHES ISPs in net neut battle

Electricity Neutrality

Treat it like a utility? We'll end up with the same system we have with electricity - tiered rates. Use more, pay (a lot) more. That ain't net neutrality. Message to government: Stay out of this - let me have more ISPs and then let them duke it out in the marketplace!

Meg Whitman: The lady IS for TURNING. HP to lob printers'n'PCs OVERBOARD

Re: oh, and your laptops

So I am not the only one with a burnt left wrist... When I finally got tired of my laptop shutting down due to overheating, I considered taking it apart and putting better thermal grease between the cpu/gpu and heatsink. Then I had a better idea that was a whole lot less work: put a big fan next to the laptop that blows right-to-left. Works great, but now my hands are cold.

Taking it with me on a trip has never been an issue since the battery only lasts about 30 minutes.

Man's future in space ... Barack Obama: Mars. Narendra Modi: Mars. Vladimir Putin: Er, Moon

How to pay for it...

As the full moon rises, you don't see the 'man in the moon', you see "ABSOLUT"

Sun of a beach! Java biz founder loses battle to keep his shore private

Re: what an asshat!

While I have to agree that this guy is truly a bad neighbor, why all the venom for the 'rich guy'? He EARNED his riches by founding a company that has since provide a lot of jobs for the likes of those who read El Reg.

If I EARNED a billion bucks, I'd likely build a nice beach-front estate (along with a bunch of security). Instead of being a jerk about it, I would be grateful for the fortune and want to provide access to the public beach in front of my estate.

Maybe people lose perspective after they earn their billions...

Climate: 'An excuse for tax hikes', scientists 'don't know what they're talking about'

Who's in control?

So let's spend trillions of our great grandchildren's money to save the planet. They might get kinda pissed at us when they look up from their government provided shelters to witness the massive meteor that truly trashes the planet. All that work for nothing...

To think that humans are in total control is total arrogance.

HP starts a memristor-based space program to launch ... THE MACHINE

Sneak Path

There are a lot of papers out there detailing the obstacles to a competitive crosspoint resistive memory. Without getting too technical, let's just say that it is really hard to make a large array of resistive memory elements where you can isolate one resistor and tell if it is high or low resistance. All the solutions to this problem that I've seen to date either add significant time to the read/write process (lots of nanoseconds, instead of the picoseconds HP is claiming), or they take up more room on the die. There are many manufacturing obstacles too.

This all leads me to conclude that we are (many) years away from having a resistive memory that is competitive with DRAM for speed, and flash for cost.

Maybe HP will be the first to figure it out, but Intel and IBM and others are dumping a lot of money into similar research too.