* Posts by GrumpenKraut

1856 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2014

Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe

GrumpenKraut

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

GrumpenKraut
Mushroom

Re: Disable Turbo Boost

You get like 15% more CPU performance for like 50% more energy. And 15% CPU power does not usually translate into 15% overall performance. On top of that, benchmarking becomes close to impossible. I have yet to see a compute cluster where any of this boost crap is enabled.

And don't get me started on that hyperthreading dreck.

Forgetting the history of Unix is coding us into a corner

GrumpenKraut
Devil

Re: Only Wayland?

> Do those parameters exist somewhere on the filesystem when running an Xorg server?

Long ago it was possible to mmap /dev/fb0 for a very direct way of drawing on X11. Colleague saw my code an instantly decapitated me. Luckily I recovered.

GrumpenKraut
Devil

Think about it: writing a bloody *book* about how and why you dislike something, instead of doing something you like.

Thinking about it, would there be a market for 1400 page tome about systemd? Any suggestions for a title?

GrumpenKraut
Meh

For me the only good thing in this book is the "Anti-Foreword" by Dennis Ritchie.

Microsoft says it'll throw €3.2B at AI ops in Germany

GrumpenKraut
Pint

"the MS-DOS giant"

LOL =--->

Robots with a 'Berliner Schnauze' may appear more trustworthy to locals

GrumpenKraut

Re: High or low?

Ick wees jarnüscht!

Linus Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem suggestion

GrumpenKraut

Re: Inode #s are unique within a filesystem

inode numbers are unique within one partition. They cannot practically be made unique on the whole system, that would require all inodes of a newly mounted partition to be checked/changed. That is why hardlinks only work within one partition.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

GrumpenKraut
Boffin

Heuristics, heuristics, and more heuristics.

I tend to use heuristics: Is the thing running on the right host? Does $(pwd) match the prefix it should? Is $USER what it should be? etc. etc.

Bail out with an informative message with anything dubious. Stuff like that has saved my arse so often!

Admittedly, scripts have to be modified sometimes. But that little bit of dull work is preferable to data loss or corruption.

Researchers confirm what we already knew: Google results really are getting worse

GrumpenKraut
Pint

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SERP: Search Engine Result(s) Page <--= I had to guess that

Memtest86+, the little RAM tester, flexes FOSS muscles with v7.0

GrumpenKraut
Thumb Up

It also does a speed test

Giving memory transfer rate for cache levels L1 and L2, and for out of cache.

Serenity OS turns five and emits first offspring, Ladybird

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Article appreciation pint

There you go =---->

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

GrumpenKraut
Thumb Up

"Cybertruck, Tesla's pickup model that looks like it hasn't rendered properly"

Musk looks like he hasn't rendered properly as well.

PEBCAK problem transformed young techie into grizzled cynical sysadmin

GrumpenKraut
Trollface

"descriptions were far from technically rigorous"

Customer: My internet is broken!

Me: Mine is working fine.

A colleague was in the room and told me after the call "Maybe you should not be saying this". Seconds later he says "Heck, just keep doing it." I did, but only with a very small number of high maintenance customers that were particularly annoying.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

GrumpenKraut

Re: Meanwhile, in Japan...

Wind from the east is not rare in Germany: in summer it typically means sunny dry hot weather, in winter it typically means sunny dry cold weather.

GrumpenKraut
Boffin

Re: Meanwhile, in Japan...

> What could account for it being concentrated in Bavaria?

Having been there I can give you one reason.

Air moved from the disaster area over parts of southern Germany. There was localized rain at the parts most affected. The rain was just enough to bring down the radioactive stuff, but *not* nearly enough to wash that shit down the drains.

Therefore some places where the rain water collected (but, again, didn't go further) were quite radioactive. At the Uni where I studied we had a small amount of such dirt/sand in the spectrum analyzer (term? I mean the one for radioactivity; that thing needed to be cooled all times). Over time you could watch the half life of several elements you normal never encounter in nature.

P.S.: I'd not be worried about radioactivity unless eating fucktons of that meat (or mushrooms), even in the 'hot' regions.

Western Digital sued over claims of data-trashing SanDisk, My Passport SSDs

GrumpenKraut
Mushroom

Re: I lost 3 years worth of music and photography

Certainly a bot. Reported.

AVX10: The benefits of AVX-512 without all the baggage

GrumpenKraut
Meh

Re: flags

There is a problem that the x86 SIMD instructions seemingly are coming from some sort of insane random generator. The linked pdf (titled "Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 10") has 1310 pages.

Playing instruments, musical talent? Psh, this is the 2020s – Meta has models for that now

GrumpenKraut

Your handle equals 3 * 79 * 34741859 * 108970193390406341511991996777364618571790157695783210212070651472997691291195028786487349. You are welcome.

'Weird numerological coincidence' found during work on Linux kernel 6.5

GrumpenKraut
Mushroom

I looked at that numerology web site

and now I want to run over a kitten with a lawn mower. Why is that?

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

GrumpenKraut
Pint

LOL, how/why do you know this? Virtual pint for random facts =------>

Mint 21.2 is desktop Linux without the faff

GrumpenKraut
Angel

Re: What's not to like?

I boot into /boot/vmemacs and write my kernel drivers in elisp. Sadly, my system is somewhat slow.

Turning a computer off, then on again, never goes wrong. Right?

GrumpenKraut
Facepalm

The web server that wasn't

Mid 1990s: customer had his own bow with Linux and a web server running on it. Few month later, after a power outage, customer calls us "The web server is gone!", me: "So it did not restart, right?", "No, the *server* is gone!", "OK, I'll have a look". Upon inspection there was nothing at all on the disk. Customer had installed everything in the installation system in RAM, nothing had every been written to disk. Took me quite a while to figure that one out. After new install I made the customer reboot the box to make sure he did not repeat the error.

Free Wednesday gift for you lucky lot: Extra mouse button!

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Re: mouse that has a non-wheel middle key

Nice to know such things do exist, will keep looking. Thanks =---->

GrumpenKraut
Meh

Re: shift-insert for paste

MrXonTR faster by 2 minutes, dammit.

GrumpenKraut
Boffin

shift-insert for paste

For Linux users: As clicking the wheel tends to rotate it a bit (which messes things up) you can use shift-insert to paste. Apparently very few people know this.

I have long looked for a mouse that has a non-wheel middle key, found zilch. Why the heck does nobody build one?

The bonkers water-cooled shoe PC, hexagonal pink workstations, and IKEA-style cases of Computex 2023

GrumpenKraut
Thumb Up

Re: Squirrel!

> Does it drive in a circle when the driver spends all their time looking at their dash-mounted phone?

That actually sounds like a good idea.

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

GrumpenKraut
Angel

Re: Coppyright length

Curious spelling of "decades" there.

Amazon finds something else AI can supposedly do well: Spotting damaged goods

GrumpenKraut
Facepalm

Re: "it's 3x more likely to spot damaged goods"

> Three times not much is not much better.

Really?

Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget

GrumpenKraut
Facepalm

Re: Weather?

> Clipping it neat and tight with no expansion loops...

That's *exactly* what they did. I looked at the cable going round the corner and was surprised it didn't just snap. Bending radius was below specs even when it was warm.

GrumpenKraut
Mushroom

Re: Weather?

> ...network would come to a shuddering stop whenever the weather froze...

Because the cold makes the cable shrink and the bends around corner get to sharp, bad with coax. Seen that a one place: -12 degrees or lower simply meant "no network today".

About lightning hitting outdoors cable, seen it once and it was spectacular. All computers in one building toast, network cards had scattered those little electronicy parts, motherboards and RAM were fried as well. Some computers in the other building somehow survived, no idea how. All in all pretty expensive.

Experimental brain-spine computer interface helped a paralyzed man walk

GrumpenKraut
Meh

Re: Regenerative medicine

From the article: "The brain-spine interface (BSI) implant used in this case seems to be helping him to grow new nerve connections."

Also read up on "Nirvana fallacy".

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

GrumpenKraut
Happy

Re: Clothing corallary

Ha, I do this. As a student I got two pairs of excellent leather gloves for about nothing. Turned out the are of *very* good quality, I am nearing sixty now and the spare pair is sitting in the drawer, still new.

Boffins claim to create the world's first wooden transistor

GrumpenKraut
Devil

The instruction sheet on how to build a 64-bit CPU will be ... interesting.

Baidu sues Apple and anyone else in sight over ERNIE chatbot fakes

GrumpenKraut
Meh

Yet another Ilya Geller acount? Would be number five at least.

systemd 253: You're looking at the future of enterprise Linux boot processes

GrumpenKraut
Mushroom

Re: I do wish systemd would just fuck off

Dear systemd

Fuck off.

Then keep fucking off.

Fuck off until you come up to a gate with a sign saying "You Can't Fuck Off Past Here".

Climb over the gate, dream the impossible dream, and keep fucking off forever.

Techies try to bypass damaged UPS, send 380V into air traffic system

GrumpenKraut

Once had a water heater that maxed out at 16KW. During winter that was just enough power to make the water decently warm. "Deep fried in seconds" is off by about three orders of magnitude. You can do the calculation if you really care.

GrumpenKraut
Boffin

> 19,000 WATTS of power which can deep-fry ANY human body in mere seconds.

Dear Mr. pants-on-fire: 19kW is what a typical electrical shower heater is rated. Still I have never been deep fried within seconds of showering.

Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

Thanks for the link. =---->

GrumpenKraut
Big Brother

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

WOW. Could you (or somebody reading this) send a story suggestion to El Reg? My email may be black-holed as it is within the Hetzner network (I once send a suggestion to On Call and never received any reply).

Meet the merry pranksters who keep the workplace interesting, if not productive

GrumpenKraut
Facepalm

"MULTIPLE incoming lines of 400,000 Volts at 1000 Amps"

Yeah, right. In excess of 400 MegaWatt to power CPUs at that time, totally believable.

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

GrumpenKraut
Facepalm

Re: Go Multithreading Issues

Your language will certainly conquer the world really soon. I see that your youtube channel has already one follower.

Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement

GrumpenKraut
Flame

Re: Textbooks...

Wow, that makes my blood boil. Cars have been smashed for less than that.

Looking for a holiday DIY project? Build your own pen-plotter, for under $15

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Sweet

More like this, please.

Just follow the instructions … no wait, not that instruction to lock everyone out of everything

GrumpenKraut
Pirate

> ... I don't see some user handles in the comments any longer.

Can only speak for myself, I have simply told the few things of interest I could tell. Now I am empty.

Me, dead-esque =---->

How I made a Chrome extension for converting Reg articles to UK spelling

GrumpenKraut
Trollface

American English, British English...

ist there a difference?

Germany stands down cyber boss over Russian ties

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Re: Hexenjagd für Kleingeister

MOAR beer in your general direction! ----------->

GrumpenKraut
Pint

Re: Hexenjagd für Kleingeister

Thanks for your comment, I actually learned a thing or two. Pint for you ---->