Posts by bombastic bob

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

Re: Long live NetBSD

or FreeBSD

Re: If these people made cars ...

well they ARE making a library that has the same functionality. hopefully a drop-in replacement

Eventually, X.org itself will be removed, as the various desktops that Fedora offers shift over to Wayland.

**YIKES!!!**

There are nearly half a billion active users of Start news feed, says Microsoft

Re: Fixed it for you

"Start News Feed". Does anyone REALLY want Micros~1 OWNING their NEWS FEED? Maybe the same people who watch [P]MSNBC might, but it's currently one of the WORST RATED CABLE NEWS STATIONS based on viewership.

This from 2020, suggests 'Resetting' the News [CR]app so that it no longer directs its ouput to the start menu, in order to get rid of it. Not sure if that's the same in Windows II or not. My guess, NOT.

Microsoft partners balk at new licensing scheme, dent growth

Re: Let me see now

Related, from the article: "some clearly struggle to see the benefits"

It is hard to see "benefits" in a monthly subscription fee (rent) for the rest of your life when you used to be able to OWN things...

"The Emperor's clothes are WONDERFUL!'" they say. And then they question why WE cannot see them, too...

Heresy: Hare programming language an alternative to C

Re: It won't have Bugs

Nyaaaa, what's up, Doc?

Re: No moving targets

Harrrrre

Elon Musk set to buy Twitter in $44b deal, promises stuff

Re: Improve Twitter?

that might be 'Plan B'

eh, what would THAT be anyway?

Re: GOP-ping

Trump has apparently been un-banned already on Twitter, but he said he was going to stick to his own 'TRUTH' network and not post on Twitter.

I doubt that pejorative, libelous, or otherwise illegal content will ever be allowed. But with any luck, all such things will receive equal treatment, now.

Re: Popcorn time

I actually signed up. you can guess what name I used. Posted a bunch of stuff that is civil and informative, but would otherwise get "flagged" just for being "not woke". Let's see what happens! And some Fox News people got un-banned today. YES!!!

Debian faces firmware furore from FOSS freedom fighters

Re: What do you mean nobody reads the source?

reading every single bit of source code is more like an AUDIT.

A quick scan looking for things you know to be problematic, or focusing on changed sections: This is extremely helpful and does not make your brain (as) sleepy.

Re: Devuan

If Devuan and Debian were to merge, and then you get a choice of init during setup (and not after), wouldn;t THAT be AWESOME? But that might require double-sets of certain packages, one with systemd, one without, as too many key packages depend on systemd being there, or its features being implemented some other way (and the two may not be compatible).

Similarly Gnome and Mate, though I believe that by now it is FAR less likely with the latest GTK forcing ADWAITA. Just NO on that.

I'd say this is why forks exist.

Re: I like Debian, but it has its own share of a*holes too.

that thing you say about inventing a new wheel... car makers do that EVERY year.

it is not necessarily a BAD thing. may the BEST wheel WIN!

Re: Fighting the wrong people in the wrong place

Do we really need a license discussion, now?

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

Trump for 2024 with De Santis as VP. Truly a dream ticket.

yes

Re: For those wondering "Why?"

Right, Royal Marines were apparently a standard part of the crew of a British Naval vessel back in the exploration days. i once toured a modern replica of Captain Cook's ship that went to Australia and new Zealand during an exploration in the late 1700's. It had a deck set up specifically for Royal Marines.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps are based on the Royal Navy and Marines.

Re: For those wondering "Why?"

Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine missions (with aircraft) are completely different.

Air Force - air to air engagements, long distance bombing runs, and related support to the other services from land based aircraft.

Navy Aviators: Aircraft carriers, remote island air bases, and "First Strike" long distance air to air and air to ground combat missions, as well as at-sea operations (including at-sea rescue).

Marine Corps: Ground support, air to air combat, "first strike" and beach landing support (as well as general support of Naval operations)

Army: Mostly helicopters for air to ground and recon in support of major land engagements.

So each has aircraft, but they are different because the missions are different. I do not think Air Force needs carrier-capable aircraft nor to practice carrier landings. Similarly short range bombers launched from carriers should not be expected to fly long distances nor carry huge payloads like a B-52. Different missions.

When I was on a sub back in the day we would occasionally have Marines on board. Their mission was to guard and defend. I generally stayed out of the radio room and other places they were involved in so did not see them much. But sometimes 4 or 5 marines would be on the ship for a given mission, whatever it might be. Jokingly we patrolled "the sewers of Moscow" back during the cold war. And so my job was to help push the mobile surveillance and weapons platform through the water. The marines probably had to guard things that probably had much higher classification than I was allowed to know anything about, and to defend that equipment and/or secret and see to its destruction in the event of capture (and possibly shoot anyone with intimate knowledge of it including themselves). So there you have it, different mission, so different service, and they ride on ships when needed to perform that mission.

[That's kinda how it works in the U.S. military]

Re: For those wondering "Why?"

I sort of mentioned the funding angle. It's easier for lawmakers to apportion money this way, and have a general idea of what it's going to be spent on, rather than "one big pile" to be fought over and apportioned according to bureaucratic whims of the moment.

Re: For those

Having a separate service that can focus on space IS a good idea. It helps to avoid the "monolithic bureaucracy" issues and the tendency to re-apportion funds if everyone must share from a great big pile. The pile will most likely be allocated according to the current whims of the bureaucracy...

Space Force, I imagine, could turn into something a lot more science-fictiony at some point. But will they use Naval ranks or the traditional Army-based ones? That is, will a Captain be an O6 or an O3 when there are actual SPACE SHIPS? Or will their be Privates and Sergeants, or Spacemen and Petty Officers?

Then again, 'Stellar Navy' could end up being its own service, too... to combat those "space pirates".

Harrrr!

Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets

Re: I do think....

you defined some actual good product ideas.

Now, instead of making them contact an outside server, run something on a PC or your phone to contact the device. Make it open source so you sell the hardware, and the software supports it as long as there are people willing to maintain it (including customers). This becomes a selling feature.

Re: Appropriate Legislation

Perhaps a better take on that: the requirement to publish the specification so that competing services can support those devices (including non-profits and home-grown).

So if 'example' company goes titsup and the 'example.com' web service is no longer available, hackers should be able to produce an equivalent service, upload to "git repo someplace", maybe ask donations like with phone apps and firefox extensions, and then you do a config change on your device to point to "example.org" instead (or whatever, maybe even an IP address on your LAN) and then you get the functionality back (or a good portion of it, depending). And ISPs could even help by making it possible to tunnel and get a listening port for things _LIKE_ this.

That's how I see it, anyway. And the requirement to publish, and make firmware updates available (or source so that they can be MODIFIED) could be an "escrow" requirement before being allowed to sell the product, so that it only kicks in if the online service being provided is in any way discontinued. Then, customers have the opportunity for 'relief', which is better than having to throw "that useless brick" away, now that the company that manufactured and/or sold it dies.

Buying a cloud product has AN IMPLIED CONTRACT. It should be ENFORCED that way. At least, in "common sense" world...

Re: D-Link does it better

Still, "The Cloud"™ is _HIGHLY_ overrated...

A few years ago I was given one of those intarweb radios as a present for christmas or something like that. Cool idea, used it for years, then find out, no longer really works right any more, always dropping the connection and getting network errors [I can watch them with wireshark].all because Broadcom (who apparently had a closed source firmware thing going on all of these radios for a while, several different brands even) dropped ALL support a couple of years ago, and will NOT even allow the radio makers to SUPPORT IT THEMSELVES by UPDATING THE FIRMWARE on these devices and thereby keep the service going on their own... and therefore the radio effectively *DIED* because, hardcoded URLS (which I can observe in wireshark) and things like that. yeah, there are some hacks availoable to "make it work" but I do not want to do that. Making an RPi do its job instead.

So, if "Cloud" tech is SO FRAGILE and only lasts a HANDFUL of years before it effectively goes titstup, then UNLESS there is an OPEN STANDARD or OPEN SOURCE way of FIXING it ourselves, I'd say:

DO! NOT! BUY! CLOUD! TECH!!!

And THIS hurts their entire business model, not just because of me, but the bad taste that MANY OTHERS get in their mouths over the UNRELIABILITY of future support for something that SHOULD last for DECADES.

Plans for Dutch datacenter to warm thousands of homes

Re: I cannot resist...

Unagi. YUM! (it's my favorite Japanese food)

you can use hot water to produce chilled water using an Absorption Chiller. However the temperature you would need is probably a LOT higher than that from the hot side of a cooling system for electronics. Still, there may be a way to recover the heat from cooling the electronics within the process.

Similarly, recovered heat from a data center cooling system could (in theory) at least reduce the electrical load needed to create chilled water in the summer by pre-heating or otherwise injecting recovered energy into the system.

Alternately, it may also be possible to use Peltier devices to generate chilled water from hot water, though I am not sure if there are any existing devices that have that kind of scale. Does NOT mean they cannot INVENT one!

So "solutions exist" but may require some cleverness and/or "scaling up".

The cogeneration system I worked with back in the 80's used engine jacket water and exhaust gas heat recovery to power an absorption chiller, pre-heat hot water (for a hotel), while generating electricity using a diesel generator running on natural gas. Excess electricity went on the grid, and it ran at full power all of the time.

Apple geniuses in Atlanta beat New York to the punch, file petition to unionize

Can't believe the US is so backwards on worker's rights.

See icon

Re: It is interesting to see the moves to unionise

I hope they are not as stuck in the past as the ones here frequently are.

It depends on the union. Many are actually beneficial to both management AND employee, but this comes from many years of partnership, stock ownership plans, and a realization that pricing yourself out of a job is bad for EVERYONE.

The idea is to bring a "win" to both sides of a labor dispute if you want to be a SUCCESSFUL union. In the far past, when unions were needed to right social wrongs, it was "robber barons" vs "the exploited". Nowadays, not so much.

I hope a union does better than non-union for Apple Store employees; otherwise, they will become victims of exploitation on BOTH sides of the union (i.e. both management AND employee).

Some years ago the Baker's union here in Southern Cali-Fornicate-You priced the Hostess bakers out of a job. Hostess went belly-up and sold all of their intellectual property to "Little Debbie", who did NOT re-open the union bakery in Cali-fornicate-you, but instead took up new production under the Hostess brand and used their newly acquired recipes to re-establish the brand. Successfully.

Lesson learned: If you price yourselves out of a job, you might kill the company in the process.

OK less likely with Apple, but still...

Microsoft plans to drop SMB1 binaries from Windows 11

I was thinking that SMB v2 support was available earlier than that...

and then i found release notes for SMB 3.6 which confirms 2011

https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-3.6.0.html

Re: That NAS under the stairs

Samba has supported SMB versions greater than one for quite a while now. If the NAS was designed before 2008 then maybe it would have SMB 1 only on it. But as hard drive sizes have improved so much since back then, I wonder why anyone would be using the old ones still... (my hard drives that are as old as that have all gone titsup long ago)

Vista was the version that introduced SMB v2 (along with server 2008). So XP and earlier have V1. I would guess that if you use '9x for old games or XP for any reason, you _might_ have trouble if SMBv1 stops being supported at all...

/me has an old XP-based book-sized Lenovo that does 3D printing occasionally

Departing Space Force chief architect likens Pentagon's tech acquisition to a BSoD

Re: He's not very involved with his work.

an overheated CPU would do it - BSoD may be the least of the outcomes. Seen it, dust in the cooler and you're doing a long build or something.

Re: COTS

back in 2010-ish i worked on a system that used drones and wifi and mesh networks for ground-air-ground battlefield communications. It was part of a proposal to the DoD. It did not get the contract, though. Point is, like many such DoD contracts, you have competing businesses offering their solutions, and as long as the specification is clear and the solutions meet the requirements, they pick the one to go with, etc. (usually the lowest bidder, but not always).

Re: COTS - Crap Off The Shelf

eh, your list is less than satisfactory since OSs like Linux, being open source, can be forked and maintained domestically.

However, _I_ would focus on the HARDWARE. Think of this: how MUCH of a typical computer is MADE FROM OVERSEAS MANUFACTURED COMPONENTS?

And THAT is the crux of the problem, as I see it. In a war, your "friend" could become your ENEMY, and with the CCP [consider their current posturing] and the Russia/Ukraine war, this is even MORE evident.

FreeBSD (and the other BSDs) were at least FORKED from things invented in the USA. I thought I might just mention that. And, again, open source makes it possible for DoD to maintain it themselves.

keep in mind that the Pentagon needs to consider a few things:

* Foreign made equipment is not under their control

* Foreign made equipment can have design features NOT conducive to national security (back doors, kill switches, things the CIA has ALREADY [allegedly] done to others I might add)

* If a war breaks out and they need MORE of this stuff, an embargo would SERIOUSLY screw things up [a single EMP might make that a necessity]

and stuff like that. "Not Invented Here" is a BAD thing for national defense.

Re: reinventing the wheel

as Henry Ford said, "you can have any color you want, as long as it is black" (with reference to the model T).

Or he said something very similar to that. It made sense when he was trying to significantly lower the average cost of ownership, which was his primary goal at the time.

Re: reinventing the wheel

car makers "re-invent the wheel" all of the time.

It is NOT necessarily "a bad thing".

Re: It can't...

I think China is already ahead on the manufacturing side...

(the Pentagon could, in fact, expedite domestic factories to REPLACE them, a kind of 'DARPA' project that would ultimately help I think, especially with the constant supply disruptions)

Ryzen Pro CPUs are better for work than Intel's, claims AMD

Re: Could do with the power saving..

similarly, in my home-based office, summer heat is only contributed to by inefficient hot-running CPUs. It's gotten better for me when the old Intel quad core (from 2007-ish) was replaced with a more efficient Ryzen 3.

(the number of CPU fans making noise is also a lot less)

Re: Microsoft's Pluton security processor

"Gobble". heh.

Re: Microsoft's Pluton security processor

if there is an open source driver for it in the Linux kernel, it will be possible to DISABLE it.

Re: Well...

I bought a 6 core Ryzen to build a second workstation about 3 years ago, then had to re-do the other workistation last year when the quad core Intel (>15 years old) went titstup. I could not get the same processor as before, so I settled for one that was a "true quad core" and not a hyperthreaded 6 core.

Still happy with the results. But of course this older quad core Ryzen 3 won't do Windows 11 in a VirtualBox VM (it runs FreeBSD, naturally, with which I get _WORK_ done). But who need Win II anyway right?

Maybe the CPU shortage problem is artificial... plenty of slightly older ones, but with artificially high demand on bleeding edge (caused in part by Win II) we have shortages. Happened with RAM, too, back in the mid 90's.

Shanghai lockdown: Chinese tech execs warn of supply-chain chaos

Re: Blame the CCP and Winne the Pooh

see icon

Re: Get out

"Effective Lockdown" - BULL! SHIT!

Can I do 1,000 thumbs down?

(in reality it is the human immune system that is the winner here)

Re: Get out

locking up 25 million people for 1000 TIMES THAT MANY 'COVID deaths' would STILL BE INSANE.

More people die of CANCER, HEART ATTACKS, CAR ACCIDENTS and DRUG OVERDOSES per capita in the USA, If I Remember Correctly.

Life *IS* risk. Only a COMMUNIST would treat people like this.

Re: Blame the CCP and Winne the Pooh

Communism. It is *STILL* evil, even in 2022.

(any questions? Just LOOK at how they treat their OWN PEOPLE!!! Would YOU want to live like that? Well if you do, move to COMMUNIST CHINA, and leave the REST of us OUT of that EVIL SYSTEM)

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

see icon

Re: Twitter - the pinnacle of soundbite crap

Brevity can be 'the soul of wit'. I actually remove a LOT from my own posts and try to keep this in mind. So I'll edit out the examples I COULD have said and keep it short. As an example.

Re: Most of us don't give a toss.

Explain to me, please, why was banning Trump a GOOD thing for Tw[a,i]tter?

And, why is ENDING (apparently) POLITICALLY MOTIVATED BANS *BAD* for them?

Without opposing ideas, there really is NO discussion. If Tw[a,i]tter wants a platform that has actual DISCUSSION on it, instead of being an echo chamber for "the left" and "the woke" (which really IS boring), they will HAVE to end their (alleged) "high school clique group" and "this is OUR country club" EXCLUSIONARY and DISCRIMINATORY policies.

Signed: "The Kind of Riff Raff" they do not want on their golf course

(this is another way of saying that they just might be SNOBS, in case that was not obvious, heh heh heh)

Re: Twitter's job is to be Twitter – not to make people rich

If censoring [read: banning, silencing] everyone who disagrees with "the woke" is "altruistic" or a "noble idea" over which a tech company were founded, then that company DESERVES to "go broke" and SHOULD abandon such "noble ideas" or "altruism" in favor of WHAT THE CUSTOMERS WANT.

Then again, if the original altruism were "do no evil", they'd be like GOOGLE...

Re: Twitter's job is to be Twitter – not to make people rich

Accepting a financial loss over the altruism of being "woke" is what Big Tech is often about, these days... or like what many have said, "Get Woke, Go BROKE!"

I prefer the TRULY open platform WITHOUT the woke-style "moderation" [read: censorship], that we all probably assume Musk wants for it, minus the "woke hysteria" about Nazis and hate speech (which is how 'the left' tries to MANIPULATE people into FEELING, not thinking, that Musk wants Tw[a,i]tter to become 'that').

icon, because, facepalm. the purpose of a company is to MAKE MONEY.