Posts by Grunchy

AWS wins 5-year, $700m+ contract for cloud services to US Navy

Joint - warfighting - cloud - capability - ?

I don’t get it, and I’m going word-by-word.

“Joint,” between military branches? Or is this ship-to-ship?

“Warfighting,” well I suppose the Navy would probably expect to “warfight“ out at sea somewhere. Implying satellite communication? Excluding cell tower communication? I guess I’m grasping at the implication.

“Cloud,” so if you’re doing data-processing out at sea somewhere, in the middle of a battle, using some land-based server system, that surely involves wireless communication at some point. Must be satellite?

“Capability.” Mystifying. I cannot guess what they’re up to. What is this, some kind of “cyber warfare” scheme?

I guess you might do some battlefield simulation, or some weaponry development research, or maybe you’re controlling a cruise missile in real time.

At some point any initiative must boil down to some, “what the h are you doing” - sort of mission statement.

(I think it’s a con-man dodge, “if you don’t know what’s going on and you need somebody to spell it out to you, you probably aren’t fit to even be at the table!”) uhhhhh, are you scamming me? That’s what I’m trying to figure out!

Happy Lunar New Year: Beijing warns of enhanced surveillance during celebrations

PBS Frontline just had their “Pegasus” documentary put online, I guess the moral of the story is, “be careful about the surveillance potential of your smart cell phone.”

The interesting part is that they think this is somehow “recent” news, and they mention a couple famous cases including Khashoggi.

But then they kind of omit Bin Laden who was tracked down by his butler’s cell phone addiction, like 12 years ago !

Or the “mob reporter” on YouTube, gleefully recounting all the organized crime take-downs they got from that “ANOM” encrypted phone network. All hapless individuals who thought they were somehow immune from the surveillance.

As for “most surveiled country,” isn’t the UK also fairly high up there on that ranking? It seems to me I heard somewhere that might be the case…

Ericsson's earnings slip as telcos rein in 5G spending

For internet I subscribe to "Cable 5 Pro" from "TekSavvy" (Canada) which goes to as fast as 5 Mbps! Costs just $34 per month, with unlimited data limits.

It's scraping toward the extreme lowest-bottom of the barrel and in fact I don't think they even let people subscribe to that anymore, you'd probably have to be "grandfathered" in (yuk yuk!).

I mean, sure, we watch a lot of NewPipe videos (definitely not YouTube anymore: Google has destroyed it with commercials!) but the "Cable 5 Pro" easily keeps up with 720P streaming.

I also do torrent in the F1 races each Sunday, many thanks to the lads on "MotorSports Replays" on Reddit.

Data transfers are not "immediate," but it gets the job done.

I do far less network access on the cell phone, I literally have no use for even 4G speeds. I guess I may not qualify as a "power user" anymore, but I cannot fathom what people are doing with 5G network speeds.

Of course that pales in comparison to 2000+ Mbps fibre connections, but come on, I'm not running a server network...

Massive outage grounded US flights because someone accidentally deleted a file

I'm grateful!

I dunno 'bout you guys but I'm thankful whenever a flight is delayed or cancelled while they work to figure out some kind of technical difficulty.

I'm aware plenty like to grouse about the inconvenience, but I also know that, beneath it all, is a 40-ton jet-powered missile that "cruises" at Mach 0.85 or so (roughly the speed of a typical subsonic bullet). The whole craft!!

That's a lot of kinetic energy, on top of 33,000 ft elevation which is more than 6 MILES vertical of potential energy.

So you see, if you ever got a bruise bumping down some stairs at walking pace KE + half a flight of PE, that (comparatively speaking) there's a possibility you could sustain serious injury if something technical goes wrong on a typical commercial flight.

It's, like, game over, man! Game over!

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

Re: 1 calory heats 1 gramm (aka 1 cm³ at 4 °C) of water by 1 °C

I disagree! Unit conversions are ridiculously easy, once you know how to wield MathCad.

I find it perplexing, however, that in each worksheet I have to “declare” that

° := π/180

“If you ask an American, specifically USA, how much Foot-pound if required to heat 1 grain of water by 1 °F, and then ask to extrapolate that to ounce, pond, minim, teaspoon or gallon the usual answer would be "f* you" since those don't correlate well. Even US scientists would just smile and decline due to the amount of work and stick with the metric system they already use (hello NASA!).”

Frankly, I get along just great with hexadecimal, and always have. Then my boy comes home from some club they set up at school, affiliated with the “dozenal society,” and all of a sudden they want factor of 3 wedged in there: yeah, duodecimal. All of a sudden it’s all these stories coming home, like how come a minute is five-dozen seconds and a day is two-dozen hours, or a circle is 30-dozen degrees, and all this! Listen, I grew up when Swatch came out with Beat Time, where a whole day is 1000 .beats: that’s 10^3.

Also as a donut appreciator I prefer the “baker’s” dozen rather than a traditional dozen.

(Although some enterprising grocers will sell you a hexadecimal dozen eggs, $12, which is a full 50% more vast than any mere dozen. Who says Easter eggs are only for Easter? I say, let’s move to “Easter Island” where every day is appropriate for egg salad sandwiches!)

Ransomware severs 1,000 ships from on-shore servers

Peasants Quest

Somebody found a shareware preview of Peasants Quest on a CD-rom in an old magazine, and >boom< it’s a run-away 1994 ransomware pandemic, all because some yokel put it on internets. Everybody thought it was safe to thrown away their windows xp antivirus & whoopsie!

https://youtu.be/xixgDV_9RJI

Basecamp details 'obscene' $3.2 million bill that caused it to quit the cloud

Hella good mp3 collection

8 petabytes is what, 8000 terabytes?

What could that be, either a photo collection or a mp3 collection or what, a bluray movie collection?

If it were ebooks I don’t think you’re going to read them all in 1 lifetime, is all I’m suggesting.

(“Somewhere in my 8 petabyte data hoard is a single fact worth $1 million. How many centuries will it take to find it?”)

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Twitter is a pretty small ‘app’

How many programmers does it take to maintain the minuscule code base? I heard SMS was originally created to piggyback off of the constant data handshakes between handsets and cell towers, which had room for 160-character messages injected with the rest of the handshake data frame. It was unused & otherwise unusable bandwidth, which is why it was originally provided for free.

… just because somebody paid $40 billion for the app doesn’t mean there’s $40 billion worth of content there, or any particular need for any staff. The entire interac network was created and operated for years by two guys, I dispute that there’s ever been any need for any more headcount than that.

Microsoft’s Nadella: Tech is in for a rough two years

How soon we forget yesterday’s big buzzwords such as “big data” and “machine learning.” Even today, I cannot apply for a job without claiming some expert knowledge in machine learning.

(Thankfully nobody seems to care about big data anymore. What a relief!)

I’m surprised that tech is only due for just 2 years of difficulty. I haven’t upgraded a thing since I last built my pc in 2017 (Ryzen 1800x still working great!) I actually never turn it off since it also monitors my network security cameras 24x7, yet it never wore out yet. I’m more interested in picking up salvage server deals from the local system recycler than paying full price for anything new. I have some serious kick-ass server systems. The last MS Office license I bought was 2016 and it still works good enough. If Windows 10 goes out-of-date I’m just going to Linux. There’s absolutely no chance I’m ever paying any licensing fee for any software, ever.

AI and machine learning are being hyped as panacea fit to solve every problem, just as had “blockchain” only a couple years ago.

I think it would be great to see machine learning blockchain artificial intelligence let out loose, see what trouble it stirs up.

My guess: everything it’s allowed to touch soon needs rebuilding.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

“Vitamania”

I read this excellent book “Vitamania” about the supplement industry, they hired lobbyists specifically to keep it deregulated so that supplements don’t have to meet any standard. Consequently, a lot of herbal supplements are literally just dehydrated random weeds from wherever!

Most of CES is worthless junk, they artificially limited themselves to pointing out only the worst one thing they found so far.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

By your logic, 2 hours of pushing broom would eternally be sufficient to buy a 8’ x 12’ 4-bit (1 nybble) room. Regardless of whatever era, including the Age of Roomba!

Hydrogen makes big BOOM. The hydrogen infrastructure is a domestic terrorist dream! All you need is a leaky H2 reservoir and an enclosing structure such as a parking garage at World Trade Center and some form of ignition source, like some random guy flicking on a light switch or a static discharge or whatever, doesn’t even matter what. The important thing is to expand the hydrogen economy rapidly right away and let creative individuals show everybuddy what use they can put it to!

I only want a turbine

Yes, a bat mobile - a real jet. You connect the output shaft to a dc generator & let ‘er rip. The generator powers a battery and the battery powers the wheels. The jet only needs to put out about 20hp or so, that’s all it takes to cruise at highway speed. Acceleration is powered by the battery, and the battery is replenished by the jet. You could even run it off ethanol or whatever if you wanted to be carbon-neutral.

Anyway, that’s the way to do it I reckon.

It's time to retire 'edge' from our IT vocabulary

If the blade server doesn’t have the edge then I don’t know. Is it like the AMD sl-edge hammer? Or maybe when you go rumm-edge for like some obscure usb cord or what-all.

Shrug?

The era of cloud colonialism has begun

Website hosting?

What is this cloud business, it’s really just website hosting?

They are liquidating tons of old servers down at the recycling center, surely you could just buy one of those & do the same?

Why would I pay big rent money when I could buy my own equipment for so much cheaper. They really are practically giving them away. It’s baffling.

University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?

Easy

You just have a proctored exam where all the students enter the examination room with only pencil + paper and 2 hrs and write us up an essay.

The AI bot is excluded!

(When I did my PMP exam they took my belt & shoes and made me go through a metal detector! And again if I visited the toilet facility!)

Stolen info on 400m+ Twitter accounts seemingly up for sale

“Cracked” Piers Morgan, huh. I guess I thought you were referring to Piers Morgan on Cracked.com:

https://www.cracked.com/blog/4-people-who-are-only-famous-because-we-all-despise-them

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

…puzzled?

In the past, big religion was relevant because of the information they had gleaned from “private” confessions, that could then be leveraged for political influence and financial benefit.

Nowadays it’s the free email services that take the place of the confessionals.

They know everything about everybody , and complain they can’t make it pay somehow!!

“Do no evil,” indeed.

FCC calls for mega $300 million fine for massive US robocall campaign

“FCC,” more like “KFC.”

The AT-5000 Auto-dialer was an invention of Professor Frink and was the Professor's first patent. Its original purpose was to inform children of snow-days, however, it fell into the hands of a bum (Jimmy the Scumbag) who used it for telemarketing.

Tesla driver blames full-self-driving software for eight-car Thanksgiving Day pile up

Robots have been killing and maiming for decades. Not because of any malicious intent, but because they have a shit-ton of power and nobody competent at the wheel.

Elon Musk to step down as Twitter CEO: Help us pick his replacement

Musk will hire a figurehead and still run Twitter

This is exactly like the 1980s when everybody set up their own BBS. Inevitably several were operated by similar asshole sysops.

BBSes gave way to “News” groups, which by the way are still active on the internet, and just as spammed out as ever. Then that all gave way to IRC or internet relay chat servers. Which at last gave way to dedicated web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Incidentally, Twitter is a much simpler service than any of the BBSes of yore, anybody could duplicate it easily enough.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Hydrogen is explosive

But you look at any combustible fuel and it's always based on hydrogen. Methane combustion is CH4 + 2 O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2O, it's fundamentally a hydrogen fuel.

The trouble with pure H2 is it's a tiny wee molecule which wriggles its way out of any containment and into the grain structure of any kind of metal, leading to all sorts of brittle fracture and dangerous release. Just a tank sitting there is leaking trace hydrogen & possibly creating an explosive hazard, depending on whether there's some sort of trap for the H2 to accumulate.

Me & my dog don't like hydrogen and explosive events. She barks fiercely when that happens! We don't like those guys.

Plaice in spaaace: NASA boosts astronauts' cognition with piscine diet

It is exceedingly important to monitor your diet in space because it’s a deadly, hostile, barren environment in which there is absolutely nothing to do whatsoever. So that’s why you need to carefully watch what goes “in,” plus whatever comes back “out” again.

It’s important to have varied activities to pursue when you become permanently locked in your space can, cuz otherwards you might go nuts-o.

Amazon, Games Workshop announce Warhammer 40k film deal

Re: Considering how much of Warhammer geek he is...

“Ragnar Blackmane of the Space Wolves would have peaked his interest more.”

Ha ha, “peaked?” Maybe “peeked?”

Would you believe, “piqued?”

Warhammer really is for the illiterate. “Marshall Law,” indeed. Hey there, cowpoke!

BBC is still struggling with the digital switch, says watchdog

I never even tried out Netflix yet

YouTube went berzerk and flooded their player software with commercials, so I’d been forced to upgrade to “NewPipe” freeware that defeats the commercials by exploiting the download function to act as an alternate streamer. Of course I had borrowed Netflix credentials from various partners on my trusty old PS3 for years but I never once bothered to try it out; I don’t think they have anything worth watching? BBC archive puts out tons of interesting archival footage all the time. I think Netflix has the Game of Thrones series but it never sounded interesting to me. Of course I loved the 1978 Rotoscope cartoon movie of Lord of the Rings, too bad they never completed the project. Forced me to read all the books! And yes, absolutely exposed the glaring plot hole about the Great Eagles flying indiscriminately into Mordor. I was greatly disappointed in the CGI remake, of course. Couldn’t even get through the first movie. Well, they make out the Elves as having superhuman Kung-fu powers, don’t they. If you want to make a 1970s Kung-fu movie that’s magnificent, I’m all for it: but not in LOTR please! Two completely different things, my opinion.

SEC charges crew of social media influencers with $100m fraud

Aw, nuts!

I thought for sure that jackass Doug DeMuro would be involved, but alas.

This episode reminds me of the time the Donald Himself thought he could turn an easy buck with his patented “Trump’s Pump & Dump”, except that, being fundamentally an idiot, he managed to lose a fortune on the scheme.

It’s all here:

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-corporate-raider-stock-prices-tax-returns-1418843

Voice assistants failed because they serve their makers more than they help users

Re: Yeah, smart appliances are DUMB.

“…relative scarcity of petroleum…”

Hmm you might not be aware of just how much petroleum we have in Alberta’s tarsands.

Agreed, the “tar” consistency makes it impossible to harvest unless it’s melted first.

Canada has been threatening to set up a Candu reactor nearby simply for the waste heat generated, to be exploited to melt tarsands for export.

Petroleum will become obsolete long before it ever runs out…

Google Glass

I still have the original voice assistant, that being Google Glass that I got for $50 second-hand so I could see what the fuss was about (much fuss about nothing, as it so happens.)

I laugh at everybody who Burned! their money on a Google Nest thermostat. A thermostat is an on-off switch that maintains a particular temperature and worth about $10. I would have splurged $20 for the programmable one, except the previous homeowner already did that. Yeah $300+ for Google surveillance thermostat just ain’t gonna fly around here.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

NAS never ever stops

I’ve got a Western Digital NAS downstairs that runs Windows Server 2008 or such, and that thing NEVER stops shuffling something on the disks. Same as my Win10 PC. I leave it on all the time, don’t bother putting it to ‘sleep’ or whatever, and it, too, never ceases chattering data back & forth.

I mention this because the modern cellular also never really shuts down, and meanwhile it could be running your SD flash device to death. For all anyone knows?

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Rocker switch and finger

Just tell the butler to attend to it. Sheesh.

Ha ha Dabbs goes to hairdresser

For permanent curls, I can only imagine?

Longstanding bug in Linux kernel floppy handling fixed

That dual-drive is a TEAC FD-505, they are desirable. Though you are right, hardly none of them work anymore. Well, they need new belts, you see.

My library still loans out CDs and DVDs, for nothing! Most are still readable.

(I save up my $1s and use them to buy "Certs" candy instead!)

Yup, I still run the 3.5" floppy disk. I got my TEAC 27L4226 USB portable drive specifically to read old 1.44MB diskettes (most of my collection were still readable!)

When I was about 12 I bought my first storage media, a 3-pack of 5.25" diskettes from Radio Shack for $20 that held 360kb each for a combined total of over 1 MB! When a 20MB hard disk could cost thousands of dollars, and here any kid with $20 could buy convenient, interchangeable media of about the same order in size. I paid $20 for the TEAC drive (new) and don't think it's worth any more, though there are lots of people begging as much as $45. Just scrounge harder. Lately I splurged $40 for a 512GB SanDisk "Ultra Fit" USB 3.1 flash device which is about the size of a "Certs" candy. I'm aware of certain CNC tools that can still load G-Code from floppy but come on, modernization is cheap & easy. All of my 3d printers utilize SD card media.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

Twitter is merely another web page run on commodity equipment, if the old team flees the miserable overlord and an outage develops, it’s not like a new team couldn’t easily take over. Or rip out everything they don’t understand and replace it with something they do understand.

I speak from the perspective of watching idiots like Donald Trump and Mike Lindell saying they’d make their own social network platforms, since they were booted off Twitter, and yup they both succeeded.

Twitter is a fundamentally simple platform that is noteworthy only because of the size of its user base. Other than that it’s really nothing but another BBS and I ran one of those for years. Ain’t nothing.

If Mike Lindell can do it, musk can too.

US offshore oil and gas installation at 'increasing' risk of cyberattack

Just disconnect it from the network

“Why” are these units connected to the internet anyway?

They don’t need to be, so disconnect them & never be hacked again.

* There, I solved it for you.

Blockchain needs a reason to exist, Boris Johnson tells roomful of blockchain pros

Blockchain already being used to great effect

I learned all about ledgers when I took accounting in high school. Blockchain is already being used in countless schemes to churn up billions of dollars in scam money from people who don’t know no better.

Sandworm gang launches Monster ransomware attacks on Ukraine

Re: Illegal attack

I noticed the same thing & sort of thought of, like, “Team America: World Police” or such a thing. Or like how UN was fixing to condemn Russia’s war but was thwarted because Russia has the nuclear veto.

I actually got to buy a Big Mac meal & enjoy it outside Lenin’s Tomb in the Red Square, I guess those fun days are done now. I suppose there won’t be any worthwhile reason to ever go back to Russia in my lifetime.

China declares victory over teenage video game addiction

Re: The War on Drugs

Right? Cops think they can stamp out murder with their endless “war on murder,” but new people are always gonna be buying new guns and new machetes and the murders never stop, it’s obviously hopeless. Time to end this ridiculous “war on crime” as a lost cause. I’m not advocating for a free-for-all death society but you’ve got to admit life hasn’t changed much since America started having massacres on a weekly if not daily basis. What’s wrong with smoking a little weed every day? Seems to me it’s “my” personal decision to become an addict, if that’s my ambition. Crime isn’t the problem: it’s laws and cops that are the problem. “Civilized society,” my ass! Give me crack and shotguns any day ;)

I mostly play Dr Mario

I’ve got endless video games: retro units, Mame rom collections, hacked consoles, steam sales, humble bundles, epic giveaways, flight sim 2020, scumm collections, and emulators galore. But I find most of that to be a bit too complicated and cumbersome.

Instead I’ve got 3 go-to’s: Dr Mario; Trackmania Turbo; and Trials Rising Gigatrack.

(Oh, and MS Mahjong.)

World's richest man posts memes as $44b Twitter acquisition veers off course

What “work”

All the content comes from the customers. The website works right now, if it goes bad just power off / power on. What “work” were all these staff doing?

Furthermore “hardcore” is a meaningless term, anybody who didn’t chicken out just got easy promotions.

Which reminds me to apply to work for Twitter., I bet there’s openings.

Intel hit with $948.8 million VLSI infringement verdict

Bah, already sold all my INTC

However, conventional wisdom advises to buy on rumour & sell on news.

Short position, then? What does the peanut gallery suggest.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Already went hardcore back in 1984

I guess I could give up being an employee and go turbo-mega hardcore?

I’m afraid Tweeter wouldn’t survive!

Sorry, Elon ;)

FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals

Re: Over the past 12 months, cryptocurrency market capitalization has declined by about $2 trillion.

Well, yes, crypto is worth less in so-called “actual money.” But who needs actual money once you’ve got crypto internet money?

Just buy stuff in crypto, come on! Free yourself of that unnecessary burden of Fiat money. As soon as everyone is spending crypto doge or whatever, we’ll all be burning the worthless Fiat money in the burning barrel or fireplace or incinerator.

Can’t give customers their “money”

That isn’t the point of crypto assets. “Customers” pay the money into the exchange and in return they get their virtual asset on the blockchain, visible to everyone who understands how to access it.

NOW they want to trade in the virtual asset back for real money all of a sudden?

See that’s suddenly a problem, because all that original money got spent already.

In fact it would be really great if all the original customers could go ahead and buy another round of crypto assets again, please. And soon, monthly obligations are coming due imminently!!

IBM to fire Watson IoT Platform from its cloud

Never trust “the cloud”

It’s just a whisp of vapour that may dissipate at any second, for no reason at all.

(Ken Jennings retakes Jeopardy crown?)

KFC bot urges Germans to mark Kristallnacht with cheesy chicken

Re: AI training

I'm not sure what event would be appropriate to celebrate with KFC cheesy chicken.

Maybe the day you got out of the funny farm? Or the day you were committed to the funny farm?