Posts by bombastic bob

Sweden asks EU to ban Bitcoin mining because while hydroelectric power is cheap, they need it for other stuff

Re: I second that request.

the heat generated by crypto-mining vs the heat generated by coiled resistance wire or heat pumping systems... which one is actually DOING WORK that might return VALUE?

Just thought I'd point that out.

(using a fully loaded multi-core CPU+GPU crypto mining setup to provide electric heat in places where electric heat makes sense... go fig)

You know what makes sense to ME? Co-generation, that's what. An engine making electricity, then capture the waste heat from the engine and heat buildings with it.

And maybe the extra 'trons from the generator can mine some bitcoin.... and heat some additional rooms.

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

Fusion rocket engines - the gist

Starting with hybrid engines, later evolving into fusion ones. Interesting.

Although it is PLAINLY obvious that a proper fusion-powered rocket engine would maximize efficiency, it will still need "a something" to fling out of the tailpipe at high velocity, as does the ion engine.

I suppose there are many ways of "flinging" but the only way I can think up looks a LOT like a standard engine, but 90% of the gamma+neutrons from the reaction would be absorbed by some hydrogenous liquid, like water, methane, or ammonia [which happen to be pretty abundant in our solar system] and then be expelled out the back end like regular rocket exhaust. "Impulse engine"

Current rocket tech runs at a temperature close to melting the engines for max efficiency and single-use. Obviously we want the re-usable kind. So efficiency MIGHT have to suffer a bit. Unless... you use the propulsion fluid itself to MAKE A LAMINAR BOUNDARY LAYER on the insides of the engine! It's something related to what is already being done, i.e. use fuel to cool the rocket nozzle. In any case some clever spark will hopefully come up with a design that captures as much energy from the fusion reaction as possible, and THEN flings it out the back in a way that maximizes utilization of kinetic energy (proportional to v-squared, how much energy is needed) and momentum (mass times velocity, and how you get thrust) along with fuel weight/mass and the overall weight/mass of the rocket itself.

(An ideal ratio of fuel use vs thrust vs reactor capacity just has to exist)

Anyway, just thought I'd mention that. Looking forward to something that ACTUALLY WORKS. 2025 - was that for the FUSION engine?

NOTE: a distance of about 30cm in liquid water is sufficient to absorb about 90% of gamma, and about 1 meter for 90% of neutrons. SO you would need an engine large enough to have the equivalent of liquid "that thick" to absorb most of the radiation and generate propulsion. The logistics of the placement of the fusion reaction itself might be the hardest part, but if you can just get most of that radiation into a hydrogenous liquid with a cooling layer protecting the metal parts, you SHOULD be able to get some very efficient thrust out of a reasonably sized engine.

Seaberry carrier board turns a Raspberry Pi into a desktop PC with 11 PCIe slots

Re: Not a surprise

well if I wanted a NAS solution I could use a USB 3 external drive, right?

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD which (last I checked) supports RPi pretty well. (I actually contributed some code for that and tested on a 3B+for 12, and I think 13 has support for RPi 4).

So a simpler and cheaper NAS: just use a USB drive, run the OS from the SD card and use ZFS on the USB drive with FreeNAS or FreeBSD itself. No problem!! Low cost, too. And if you add a couple of USB 3 "thumb drives" with large storage capacity, even better.

Still having a bunch of PCIe interfaces available for an RPi is an interesting toy. Beyond that [for a real solution] not so much. The USB 3 ports on the RPi 4 should provide all of that and more.

Kremlin names the internet giants it will kidnap the Russian staff of if they don't play ball in future

Re: a state run by mafia

If they were SERIOUS they would not make TROPISH BAD GUY SPEECHES.

They'd JUST F-ING DO IT.

What's the deal with ANNOUNCING YOUR PLANS like that... *INTIMIDATION* ???

("Bad Guy" monologues - like a poorly written B movie super-villain)

*FACEPALM*

This reminds me of that one scene from the old "Stargate SG-1" Sci FI TV series...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjlCVW_ouL8

NASA boffins seem to think we're worth saving from fiery asteroid death so they're shooting a spaceship at one

Re: Surely it would be better to bounce off than crash?

inelastic collisions will have a bigger effectl than a glancing elastic collision. If you are lucky enough to hit it straight on (so that all momentum transfers) like a billiard ball, then sure, why not. But the more likely scenario is a glancing blow that sends both objects off in predictable directions. So an inelastic collision (i.e. buries itself a few feet into the dirt on impact) would guarantee momentum is entirely transferred to the asteroid's moon.

Re: thinking we can "just" blow stuff like this up.

the REAL test is actually HITTING the moving asteroid moon in the right spot.

(that's one HELL of a shot, right? Any sniper would envy THAT one!)

SSL keys, sFTP passwords and more exposed after someone broke into GoDaddy Managed WordPress using 'compromised password'

Re: Always be in doubt when asked your details

and don't read those "confirm your identity" phishing e-mails in HTML format - they'll have deceptive links in them, most likely

I host my company web+mail using a simple ssh-shell shared hosting service. E-mail setup is very easy. It has PostgreSQL available too. But at this point I'm only using simple php and mail.

Point is there are MANY hosting options. Godaddy bought the service I was using, and this one was set up using former operators of the old service. You can probably guess who they are now. Godaddy basically moved the hosting and stopped supporting PostgreSQL and LetsEncrypt, so I went elsewhere. Something like that. (but i would probably have stayed with them if they had kept the features I wanted)

Re: Why are they even holding "passwords"?

shouldn't these things go though a gibberishificator

well the way Linux and BSD do/have done it with a one-way hash+salt usually does the job. Just store the hash+salt, send credentials via SSL only. The hash can be publicly readable, too, won't matter if it's using a decent hash algorithm. I would expect MOST systems to do it this way, or very similar. No reversible password decryption ability, EVAR.

(anything LESS than that is completely insecure and unacceptable)

Rust dust-up as entire moderation team resigns. Why? They won't really say

the name 'Rust' is so CORROSIVE anyway, why not just fork it and call it... Belgium? Semprini? Throat-wobbler Mangrove?

no wonder the CoC team left....

It signifies that we are allowing the variable to take on the value it feels comfortable with.

good one!

Re: No one really knows publicly

We also asked on Twitter and no one seemed to know.

irony. heh heh heh heh

Re: Rust Alternatives and Roots

I think Java succeeded over C++ because it's portable

THAT would be a VERY good guess, In My Bombastic Opinion.

(it certainly makes sense to ME)

This particularly for GUI applications, and on platforms like Android that have traditionally used it almost exclusively for a very long time.

Re: Sounds like the team

"WD" stands for "Water Displacer". Good for de-moisturizing electrical panels that were accidentally exposed to sea water.

Re: If it's important enough to resign

set themselves on fire in protest?

THAT would be popcorn worthy!

(seriously I just want to see them write quality code without running the project off into the weeds)

Re: Linux a disaster with just one controlling voice which explains why it's had no real take up.

I thought the snark was pretty obvious, actually (or was I wrong?)

Re: A shame...

seems to be run by a top heavy bunch of managers

The bureaucracy-speak quoted within the article was making my brain fog and my eyes glaze over.

(Yeah I THOUGHT I smelled 'bureaucracy')

All of this anal retentivity over CoC and violations and bans and @#$% makes me wanna puke my guts out (wanting very much to continue on with something along the lines of "vacuous toffee-nosed malodorous pervert" like a famous Monty Python sketch... but would THAT violate their CoC? Oh the tangled webs we weave!!!)

Yeehaw, y'all! Texas done got itself a honkin' new Samsung semiconductor plant

Re: 5 Million Sq Meters?

"Everything's big in Texas"

reminds me of a joke where someone gets drunk and falls in a swimming pool at a Texas hotel and screams out "Don't flush, don't flush!!!" (up to that point he'd been given a 1lb hamburger and a 32oz beer because "Everything's big in Texas")

Texans are proud of their "BBQ Tradition". When I was in Dallas a decade or so ago on a business trip (solve problem with customer integration of software) , the locals insisted on going to a food court for lunch one day where they served up traditional Texas style BBQ (slow cook, not grillin') and It was pretty good, so there ya go. Corn fed beef, too,.

PHP Foundation formed to fund core developers, vows to pay 'market salaries'

Re: PHP - a language without any theoretical basis, accretiating over the years

I do not seem to have any trouble understanding how PHP is intended to work.

It is actually a LOT like the early IIS design (but that was in C as I recall). In short, a Perl-like interpretive language that has flexible named indexes for arrays and acts mostly like an HTML filtering language.

combine it with 'shell_exec' external utilities (written in whatever) and clever use of URLs and parameters, it's VERY powerful (and flexible).

But it's not really a "general programming" lingo.

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

I wonder if it's even possible to write nice PHP

maybe it's because code like the kind _I_ write is never seen by most people...

either that or your semantics of what "nice PHP" is might be the defining factor. If you think of it as a programming language, rather than a web page filtering language, you might be greatly disappointed...

(I would much rather do server-side PHP-based things in lieu of browser-based javascript ANY time, and do as a matter of fact, whenever possible).

The kinds of things I like the best are when I get pages to post back to themselves (but with a GET or POST variable assigned to something) to a) show a "loading" or "waiting" screen, then b) refresh to the actual screen once the server-side code finishes generating the output. For device control where there are expected delays, this works VERY well. Simliarly you could do this for database results or anything that takes more than 1 second to load.

(in PHP it is easy, though I have some helper functions i typiccally put in an include file)

essentially:

$thingy = !empty($_GET) ? $_GET["thingy"] : "";

...

if($thingy == "")

{

? >

some web page with this in the head

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0.1;url=/thingy.php?thingy=Y">

< ?php

exit;

}

etc.

(spaces after less-than and before greater-than added to avoid errors posting)

Genetically modified E coli bacteria produce ink for 3D printing programmable objects

nano bioroids

essentially like nanobots to fix things in a human body, but biological ones. OK so far...

But what happens if the human immune system sees them as an infection when they are used as a treatment? I assume injecting them as part of a treatment, like little cancer eaters or something. Or maybe they just STAY in the lab and make designer drugs?

E-coli from other organisms (than yourself) can play havoc on your health. best not let this get out (like OTHER "things": that have been demonstrated to escape from a lab and cause WORLDWIDE HAVOC)

Server errors plague app used by Tesla drivers to unlock their MuskMobiles

Re: Internet dependency

You can "bluetooth key" multiple phones to the car and multiple cars to the phone

can I just TURN ALL THAT *OFF* ? And I use my dumb-phone if there's an emergency...

Re: Internet dependency

I'm keeping my 20 year old dino-oil burner.

The Rust Foundation gets ready to Rumbul (we're sure new CEO has never, ever heard that joke before)

Re: Someone have to say it

why re-invent basic syntax just tko provide additional functionality?

Python's indent-based syntax is often criticized and hated, for example.

One version of BASIC that I worked with used ':' to separate commands on the same line. I think the ';' actually dates back to Algol, then Pascal and C both adopted it because it makes sense.

Re: Garbage Collection

I am certainly NO fan of garbage collection. I think it is a CANCER that needs to be removed as an option. The best way to manage object lifetimes (outside of a single function) is with thread-safe reference counting, coupled with a little discipline like allocating and freeing an object ONLY via a constructor utility and a destructor (as an example) which would both employ reference counting so that the object can be shared and will live its life long enough to prevent GPF/PageFault and other nastiness.

As long as you can preserve the life of an object WITHOUT garbage collection, your programs will be faster, AT LEAST as reliable, and without the bloat/overhead that garbage collection would otherwise require. Bumping a ref count using atomic operators is often only a few CPU instructions.

(handle de-reference using sufficiently randomized handle values, along with an efficient hash, is one way to manage this - yes I do this myself, actually)

Re: Congrats

they have not aged particularly well

I completely disagree. What is your definition of "aged well" such that it would NOT cover C nor C++?

(a moving target that radically changes every few months is NOT "aging well" just in case that is what you meant)

about that steeper learning curve...

Back in the 1980's I learned C programming in a night class at a local city college.

That's VERY important: you can take a night school class to learn C.

Is there such a thing WORLD WIDE for Rust? (I looked n the San Diego city college web site and did not see anything, but maybe my search terms were wrong... it's where I had my C class decades ago)

As for language speed, it's interesting that C and C++ (according to the article) are still a bit faster than Rust.

in fact, there was a comparison: "But so are Ada and FORTRAN" (FTFY)

I learned FORTRAN long ago, on my own from reading the docs. My assembly language prof LOVED Algol, and C was still mostly unknown outside of the UNIX community. I taught myself Pascal but wasn't really good at it. The C class helped a LOT.

And my first OFFICIAL I.T. job was programming in FORTRAN for the ASK/MANMAN system on an HP3000. Old school I.T. (The accountants liked me because I got all of their report backlog done and talked to them to see what they REALLY needed before doing it. Even the HR guy changed his mind after I provided him with some complicated reports he wanted. HR usually HATES me. But yeah, FORTRAN was a big part of it).

So it woulx seem to me that FIXING THIS OTHER PROBLEM, that is the STEEP LEARNING CURVE, would be the RIGHT thing to do.

(that and stop trying to use Rust when it is really not fit for purpose)

Web trust dies in darkness: Hidden Certificate Authorities undermine public crypto infrastructure

Re: self-signed CA

on Linux and FreeBSD it appears that the cert list is protected.

OpenSSL has a utility 'certctl' for things like that.. 'certctl list' to see them.

on FreeBSD the files are in /usr/share/certs and it's writable only by root.

(I scanned the files and they all all read-only owned by root)

I would surmise that there is the ability to load local versions of these certs to extend the list. Firefox lets you add additional certs, for example (and it may have its own separate list)

Re: Renaming something “hidden”…

I use my own self-signed root cert for IMAP access from outside my LAN on a public IP (SSL only of course). I had to add it to the Android device I read e-mail with when I'm out and about. That would be a legit use of such a cert. I am sure there are many others doing things LIKE this.

"We discovered that a Windows Trojan implanted root certificates disguised as SecureTrust CA 2 into infected hosts"

This of course is a malicious use of such root certs.

So, are Firefox, Chrome, Android, and maybe OTHER browser/mail-reader makers going to offer a utility to tell you which root certs are installed that are NOT in their approved list (and let you delete them)? Maybe add a "scan root certificates" function to let users easily do that from 'settings' ???

It sounds like a legit feature request. So what if it causes trouble for firewall appliances. Let IT managers deal with the aftermath. "Security Now" is a better plan, along with more end-user flexibility and control

Ubuntu desktop team teases 'proof of concept' systemd on Windows Subsystem for Linux

I too am a BSD user, and prefer FreeBSD over Linux for a lot of things... but for certain benefits (like official support of RPi for example) Linux is often the better choice for production systems.

Still that means I have to *DEAL* *WITH* that 'S' word abomination (the init that shall not be named).

Yet if something is SO SUCCESSFUL then WHY TRY TO RE-INVENT IT ??

"Time for it to go its own way" - WHY ???

Others have commented that SystemD is a lot LIKE the way MS crammed everything into the registry. At first it was interesting until EVERYTHING DUMPED THEIR POLLUTION into it. I suppose SystemD will eventually grow in size (theme from The Blob playing in my head, the one by Burt Bacharach) until it becomes just as monolithic and "my god its full of CRAP" like the windows registry...

just how bad and icky do things have to get before people yell "STOP " loud enough for these JUNIOR engineers to HEAR IT? Let alone, LISTEN??

Re: "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

Roughly twice as many as I expected.

The other must be a sock-puppet

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

agreed. last 2 motherboards I purchased boot just fine with FreeBSD, no key required.

Both support Ryzen so they are pretty new designs.

Re: @jake - "2 users though have frequently requested systemd support"

yes but NOW we know their EVIL PLAN. Heh heh heh!

Why not JUST install Linux???

(in a VM if your host system MUST be Windows!)

I am (right now) running Win-10-nic in a VM and updating it. It's been a year... and I just recently updated this FreeBSD box with the newest ports, kernel, userland. Might as well update the VMs too, right?

So maybe I'll play with WSL too, but that would be kinda pointless, I think.

(I like Cygwin anyway and use that on Windows 7 pretty frequently - rsync for backups really rocks!)

(strangely the icon dd not work without disabling scripts completely)

Boffins use nuclear radiation to send data wirelessly

Re: a small step

there is a well known (theoretical) nuclear reaction in which a moving neutron in the presence of a gravitational field has a probability of splitting into a proton, an electron, and 2 anti-neutrinos. This reaction conserves mass+energy, momentum, and particle/anti-particle balance, and for a very long time the anti-neutrinos were only theoretical.

In any case, the neutron communication beam would, in fact, end up decaying into anti-netrinos and free hydrogen-1 at some point.

icon, because, nuclear radiation, right?

unfortunately I do not know of any reaction that produces anti-matter proton+electron and neutrinos... at least not in THIS universe where matter (not anti-matter) won the "big bang" (theoretically). Maybe if it happens in the presence of ANTI-GRAVITY??

Oh, and to produce neutrons it may be a bit easier if you use an alpha emitter and boron. If done electrostatically (from an ionized beam of helium gas) it might actually be practical to modulate it with a signal. OK an adapted design of a travelling wave tube just popped into my head, morphed into a particle accelerator with a Boron-10 target. Mad Science!

Google wants US government to help develop chiplet design standards, so they're easier to make and buy

getting government involved

getting government involved... would NOT be an improvement!

better for private industry to just step up and build competing foundries NOT in China and learn the obvious "do not put all eggs in one basket" object lesson.

yeah 'chiplets' too if it makes 'em happy. But we do NOT need GUMMUINT "gumming up" the electronics industry. Keep them OUT or EVERYONE suffers.

(keep in mind a great deal of this supply SNAFU, with ships parked too long off of the L.A. coastline as one example, may in fact be a DIRECT RESULT of GUMMINT being IN THE WAY, as usual, GUMMING things up and supplying plenty of red tape)

Two non-Gtk Linux desktops have put out new versions

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

you are "not wrong" - I also use MFC and Win32 to do the occasional windows application, with DevStudio 2010 (the last one before the 2D FLATTY and WinApe / Win-10-nic crap). i turn off all things that might reference ;Not and statically link everything. Then I can just ship a single .EXE to whomever needs it. heh.

I've toyed with GTK and looked at Qt. but most of my linux/BSD stuff is daemons and utilities, and web-based GUI for embedded. (and if you do it right you can make it touch-screen compatible AND avoid a FLATSO look pretty easily)

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

at least they did a major revision before the major change...

(that way we can keep using the old one - "UP"grading is HIGHLY overrated)

A lot of Mate stuff still uses GTK 2 last I checked

Re: Variety is the Spice of Life...

" It all boils down to bad design choices by a handful of developers that end up taking the Linux desktop over the cliff with them"

So, is THAT why the screenshots for the (NOW) Qt-based desktops mentioned in the article have 2D FLATASS min/max/close buttons in the address bar instead of 3D looking ones?

I was hoping for better... "my beautiful bubbles, STOP BURSTING THEM!!!" (said by 'Meracle", a playable game character in a P.A. from 'Star Ocean The Last Hope', a console game I could play indefinitely)

what's with that Win-10-nic look in X11 desktops anyway??? yeah, I use Mate with TraditionalOk, and *NOT* Adwaita!!! Let's hope these Qt-based desktops can do something similar.

Billion-dollar US broadband bonanza awaits Biden's blessing – what you need to know

Their claims do not sound that far off though.

speed of light suggests that 500 miles of altitude (low orbit) would take about 3msec on each leg of the trip if it is directly overhead. Add equipment and queue delays like any router and it does not sound that bad at first. But to make that work you need a LOT of those satellites. This as opposed to something in geosync orbit (around 22,000 miles) that would be ~120msec each way.

and now, web pages will become even MORE scripty and bloated

just like how Windows became LESS EFFICIENT and PIGGY as CPUs got more powerful, and available RAM increased.

I suppose you might say

"The efficiency of a program or operating system is inversely proportional to the power of the computer that runs it"

- or -

"The efficiency of a web site is inversely proportional to the speed of the network that accesses it."

get used to massive CSS and javascript libraries delivered by nightmarish CDNs like you've never seen before...

(and do not forget that in theory those CDNs could be TRACKING YOU and SELLING THE DATA)

Turns out there is something everyone may agree on in Congress: Let netizens use mostly algorithm-lite apps

Re: RE: Search engines exempt

you got MY up-vote

Re: Looks like a step in the right direction...

they silently excluded anything that sounds like GDPR though... while trying to make it APPEAR that they are "doing something"

International Space Station fires rockets to dodge chunk of destroyed Chinese satellite

Re: Misleading headline!

I dunno, blasting obstacles with space weapons sounds like fun

Keep calm and learn Rust: We'll be seeing a lot more of the language in Linux very soon

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

I have no trouble at all using C or C++ (and do it all of the time, actually).

Memory management is simple if you just think about what you're doing. You can always use thread-safe reference counting (via atomic increment/decrement for example) if you need something that lives outside of a function. What's so hard about that?

And the primary code flow can be written to avoid the inefficiencies of "one size fits all" objects/classes. Error handling can get a "goto error_exit" where there is code that cleans things up the way they are. That happens a LOT in kernel code, i.e. use of 'goto' for error handling, because it is efficient.

Maybe there are just too many JUNIOR developers out there that need to be coddled and have their hands held by built-in idiot-proof memory allocation and the associated bloat and garbage collection, and all of the OTHER INEFFICIENCIES that go along with it all.

(take a look at how the internals of Linux and BSD efficiently handle pre-allocated kernel buffers, for things like file system I/O and the network stack - it's a wake-up call if you've never seen it - and long ago I started using similar methods for my own stuff because it works so well)

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

You can polish a turd all you want. In the end, it's still a turd. Yes, I mean Rust.

Rusty turds. heh.

Also sounds a bit like another REG-COMMENTARD-ISM I've grown to love - "putting the lipstick on the NON-oinky end of the boar." (or similar)

Re: The way in which this turd is being pushed “top down” makes me want to puke

The problem here is clearly that there are dipshit C programmers that will keep allocating memory and passing pointers around “the old way”, because that's what they learned, because that's what they know. They will call the C filesystem functions, because they always used them.

Are you ACTUALLY suggesting that NOT using 'std' objects for your code makes you a DIPSHIT???

Personally I find the std classes to be INEFFICIENT and CUMBERSOME, as if you were trying to type with GARDENING GLOVES ON. Or something like that. I could write better templates in my SLEEP while DRUNK and they'd be more efficient and less like "academic self-pleasuring exercises".

Good C++ code often looks a lot like good C code, and may in fact be INTERCHANGEABLE between the two languages.

Re: aggregious

eh the spell checker accepted it. what the hell... it's late at night here and this font is too small to read properly with.

*DOH*

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

Re: One million homes - I don't think so

small reactors, as I pointed out before, typically have negative temperature coefficients, which mean that they can respond to varying demand much better than a coal, oil, or large nuclear plant could.

In short, as temperature goes up, power will drop, stabilizing the system.

Large reactors typically have positive temperature coefficients, making them inherently unstable. They raise power slowly, then maintain it at a constant for weeks/months at a time. Hydro, wind, and diesel plants take up the peaks. SMR would eliminate the need of peaker plants and varying load on hydro and wind. So it's a good thing if you believe that CO2 is hurting the planet.

(I do not believe CO2 is a problem but nuke power is a good thing anyway)