* Posts by bombastic bob

10507 publicly visible posts • joined 1 May 2015

FreeBSD 13.0 to ship without WireGuard support as dev steps in to fix 'grave issues' with initial implementation

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Someone will be along in a moment to blame C for all that, by the way.

predictably so, yeah. And it happened. I'm avoiding that part of the thread.

Richard Stallman says he has returned to the Free Software Foundation board of directors and won't be resigning again

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: I'm Back...

Actually, that particular statement I agree with. Not so sure about having Stallman back...

(not looking forward to the possibility of something like, let's say, a GPL 4 ...)

Listen to The Sound of Perseverance: Not the death metal album, but NASA's Mars rover on the move

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Sounds like ...

after listening to portions of both the raw and filtered, it seems to me that the 'scratches' were, in fact, the sounds of the powdered regolith-like material being pressed into the cracks of the wheels. Some kinds of powdery stuff will 'squeek' when you compress it. That's what it sounds like to me. And filtering it out loses that aspect of it, so the raw version is the better one.

If you listen to it carefully with this in mind, it makes sense. The rover is going over rocks and powdery regolith-like material [as apparent from the photo anyway] and leaving some nice patterns in the dirt, showing how it's being pressed between the cracks of the wheels.

I suppose without that sound-sync video it's only possible to guess. But it also helps to be a musician who does amateur recording and equalization and noise removal and things like that.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: speed of sound

sorta like what Helium does to your voice, or Argon gas for that matter.

makes sense, yeah. Density of the sound medium altering the frequency (and other characteristics) of certain kinds of sounds.

Windows 10 Insider build fixes the fix it sent out to fix the fix that broke printing? Afraid not, but here's a new Notepad icon

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Paperless

I mentioned this to a similar response for a related article...

RIght now it's "tax season" in the USA. To electronically file them, you usually have to print something, then sign it, then scan it, then attached the scanned document to your electronically filed tax stuff.

Can't do that if the printer is broken. And it's due on or before April 15.

The only OTHER alternative seems to be PRINTING EVERYTHING and mailing it. Printer required, yeah.

Microsoft nudges Windows 10 21H1 toward commercial customers

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "users should not expect much whizzbangery"

not to be bothered by an OS that wants the spotlight

_SO_ many thumbs up you deserve for this

(it's like a program that significantly altered your autoexec.bat and config.sys files without your permission, back in the DOS days - the 'arrogance of the developer', as if HIS software is THE most important thing YOU have on YOUR computer...)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Wish list

just doing what the majority of uses want,

Where are these 'straw man' "users" exactly?

It has been my general opinion (and observation) that Micros~1 went off of the customer dis-service "cliff of shame" like so many other techno-lemmings, FORCIBLY adopted the 2D FLATTY look [instead of giving us A CHOICE], removed features THEY didn't want US to have, created NEW features they wanted US to use INSTEAD, and tried to shove a poor attempt at "touch-friendly phone-like interface" down the throats of PC users that were perfectly happy with their keyboard+mouse interfaces (while Windows Phone collapsed under its own bloat, rendering the entire 'One Windows' concept COMPLETELY MEANINGLESS AND IRRELEVANT).

And they basically re-invented the wheel [poorly], rendering ALL previous Micros~1 wheels "obsolete" and executed DELIBERATE pressure (GWX) to PREVENT US FROM USING THE OLD VERSIONS, and _THEN_ (finally) MADE US TAKE IT WHETHER WE WANTED IT OR NOT, "for our own good", by dumping support (and convincing software makers to NOT support 7 any more) as if they were some kind of government bureaucracy in charge of how we MUST use OUR computers. And so on.

And from what I've seen, THIS is MUCH closer to "what the majority of users want" than what you said...

"Stepping back in time" - it would be good for us ALL. Let's step back to Windows 7's interface, and software that you OWN instead of RENT, _NO_ advertisements within the applications _OR_ the OS, and LOCAL logins instead of cloudy-track-you logins. and so forth.

My PC is *NOT* a phone, so why the "phone-like" interface?? And what _I_ do with it is *NOT* Micros~1's (or anyone ELSE's) business!!!

At least with this last update, it seems Micros~1 isn't cramming anything "new, shiny" at us. As someone else has mentioned, I hope they spend the next 2 years FIXING BUGS instead of CREATING NEW ONES within their FORCED UPDATES.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Joke

Re: Microsoft nudges Windows 10 21H1 toward commercial customers

first thing I thought of when you said that...

"Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, know-what-I-mean?" [spoken by Eric Idle some ~50 yeas ago]

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: Its time to stop polishing this t**d

my windows systems (running 7) always seem to do their best when I include Cygwin to give me a bash shell and POSIX utilities to do those things that POSIX does best. Good example, searching windows header files for definitions and function names. 'find' and 'grep' are SO awesome together...

On the TIOBE index, Power[s]Hell is at number 46. Perl is at 17.

I looked at a comparison of bash vs Power[s]Hell commands and most of them weren't QUITE this bad, but the article basically said things like this:

In bash, you would use 'cp -R Tools ~/' but in PowerShell you'd say

Copy-Item -Path '.\Tools\' -Destination $env:USERPROFILE -Recurse

Yeah some improvement THAT is.

What's in Fedora 34? GNOME 40, accelerated Wayland, PipeWire Audio, improved Flatpak support, and more

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: not excited about the 'wayland' thing

not downvoting you. You have expressed a discussion-worthy common misconception about Xorg and whether or not it is being maintained or has a future. If necessary, it would be forked like Mate.

My actual *FEAR* here is that (for some reason) Fedora is now RH-beta, and RH seems to carry actual WEIGHT whenever their engineers foist something upon the POSIX OS GUI desktop world.

For normal workstation I use FreeBSD. For Linux I use Devuan, and Raspbian/RaspberryOS when I have to. I reject as much of Poettering's contributions as possible.

Also, keep in mind, that change is NOT always a GOOD thing. Sometimes it's called "going bad" or "rotting". When your primary focus is GETTING WORK DONE, you do NOT need your tools to change shape and/or appearance and/or functionality, requiring you to RE-LEARN for an extended period of time INSTEAD OF DOING PRODUCTIVE THINGS. And the use of DISPLAY is one of those productivity things that means _I_ will _NEVER_ use Wayland until they implement it!!!

For size you need to consider that the modules included with Xorg support many obsolete displays, and drawing code that supports them [example, VGA 4-bit planes] whereas a "modern" display is probably 24-bit or 32-bi RGB or RGBA and the code to manipulate individual color pixels is MUCH simpler than it was for 16-color VGA. That doesn't even mention the myriad of display drivers...

In any case, this Fedora release is probably an indicator of where RH wants to take us. I may not want to go along for the ride... at ALL.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

not excited about the 'wayland' thing

are we going to need to fork X11 the way we had to fork gnome 2 into Mate ???

NOT wanting 'Wayland'. It breaks the use of the DISPLAY env variable for remote X11 protocol, which _I_ _USE_ _ALL_ _OF_ _THE_ _TIME_ for doing things *LIKE* using a GUI editor on source files on an embedded system that either has too tiny of a screen or is running headless.

And don't even *SUGGEST* that a bloatware like Wayland and a non-solution like "cloud server" would even REMOTELY make it possible to do the same thing...

another good alternative in the X11 world is tigerVNC server, which can implement the entire desktop on a headless system, or allow for a secondary desktop on the SAME system (with vncviewer to display it). But of course, it's X11 protocol.

<snark>

But, then again... we gotta have CHANGE for the SAKE of CHANGE. I forgot.

</snark>

counterarguments: optional. still have X11. [for NOW, yeah]

might I remind you all:

* systemd

* Pulse Audio

* Gnome 3

any questions?

Watch it go: World's smallest self-folding origami bird that reminds us we were promised nanobots at some point

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Now that's more like it...

every currency unit spent on space exploration indirectly benefits EVERYONE, and you're getting something for that money, as opposed to tossing it into a black hole of gummint waste, fraud, and abuse.

History has shown that the invention of the integrated circuit, microprocessors, and even [to some extent] cell phone technology has been driven by the need to miniaturize and run on limited power.

Large scale integration was VERY expensive at first. ONLY NASA had a budget and a need for it.

I recommend a study on the Apollo nav computer, how it worked, why it was built entirely with 'nor' gates, what kind of read-only and read-write memory tech they used, how THAT stuff was actually made [that's right - hire women who are good at sewing to string the beads, so to say] and so on. I read about it on wikipedia and other places, found it to be pretty interesting, even intriguing, just what it was they did to make those things work "back then" and how far weve come in our technology since then, MUCH OF WHICH was driven first by space exploration...

also http://www.righto.com/2019/09/a-computer-built-from-nor-gates-inside.html for a fun read about early computers used by NASA.

(they would have not built it "that way" were it not for the limited capability of ICs at the time they designed it, but once working, did the job for which it was tasked, and did it well enough.

"Mad Science" (to the tune of 'Weird Science')

bombastic bob Silver badge
Boffin

Re: could have some practical allications sooner, rather than later

may already be done with DLP - not sure how the moving mirrors are created.

I was thinking NASA applications, solar cells and antennas that unfold and other things of that nature. You'd need to scale up, of course, bigger than 60 microns.

Electronically tunable SMT inductors and capacitors would be another possibility, with little micro-thingies changing the physical dimensions of the reactive component. Might make it possible to create something with a wider operating range than using a varactor diode.

Then there are medical uses, maybe artificial muscles and eye lenses and so on.

now I'm reminded of that Dr. Who episode where someone gets a brain mod that opens up a 'hatch' in your forehead that exposes your brain when you clap, shuts it again with a 2nd clap.

and, can we build them with FPGA or microcontrollers, to perform complicated autonomous motion? You know, ACTUAL nanobots!

Trail of Bits security peeps emit tool to weaponize Python's insecure pickle files to hopefully now get everyone's attention

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: pwned by default

I've never tried torch.save or torch.load and so I didn't even know about this...

I can understand how a binary data format would be better. But NOT one with executable CODE in it, which is where LOTS of back doors have creeped in... Word doc... Excel spreadsheet... enhanced metafiles... flash... the list goes on.

*IF* the parser is re-written to convert old style files into harmless data [without executing functions] then it could continue, but I expect it will convert slower in the process.

Better still, bite the performance bullet and use XML or tab-delimited columnar text or some OTHER standard data-only interchange format (though I'm not a fan of JSON) to store and load this kind of data. NOT that hard, and if the interpreter is [intelligently] written in C, it might be just as fast on large data sets [ones limited by disk access speed], though I expect data compression might be needed to keep the file sizes small. gzip works pretty well for that on text data.

/me points out that CPU-piggy C++ code that relies on exception handling and uses 'new' a lot would NOT qualify as "intelligently written".

Microsoft fixes the thing it broke via another dose of out-of-band patching to deal with BSOD printing problems

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: "It is almost as if the company does not test things properly... "

If they took the time to test things then they

would have to PAY PEOPLE to QA updates before they get shipped to end-users.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: It is almost as if the company does not test things properly before unleashing them on the world

Captain Obvious AGREES

.NET 6 preview 2: Microsoft confirms no visual designer for WinUI 3.0 at launch

bombastic bob Silver badge
FAIL

Re: "the next evolution in the Windows app development platform."

from the article:

WinUI 3.0 is intended to be the primary official framework for Windows desktop applications.

and

Microsoft's problem is that it has changed strategic direction so many times that developers outside a niche of Windows enthusiasts will have little confidence in the future of the current flavour.

If I'm going to switch frameworks, it'll be with something that is

* written in C or C++ _FOR_ C or C++

* easily converted from existing MFC applications

* runs on windows versions as early as XP

* does not require a boatload of monolithic libraries and "indexing" for an hour or so after "yet another upate"

* will NOT break my application in the future when some 3rd party garbage "app" installs its own crap on a computer [and then _I_ get THE MIDNIGHT PHONE CALL from DESPERATE CUSTOMER needing HELP to GET MY APPLICATION WORKING]

* Compiles on Linux or FreeBSD or OS/X as well as Windows.

RIght now I can think of 3 frameworks that work for this:

* QT

* GTK

* wxWidgets [which uses GTK]

wxWidgets is actually POSSIBLE to port from MFC and create Linux (etc.) versions of EXISTING WINDOWS APPLICATIONS. It's not pretty, but MUCH faster than a complete re-write.

OK - Micros~1, _*WHY*_ do we need "yet another toolkit" again??

Third time's a harm? Microsoft tries to get twice-rejected encoding patent past skeptical examiners

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Prior Art.

YES. This is EXACTLY what I was thinking!

A borked bit of code sent the Hubble Space Telescope into safe mode, revealing a bunch of other glitches

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Test before deployment ?

yeah what I was thinking - they need to have a 'cloned' Hubble (simulator at least) upon which they stage EVERY update. And if it did not catch THIS problem, it needs to be fixed...

Microsoft's GitHub under fire after disappearing proof-of-concept exploit for critical Microsoft Exchange vuln

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Error by MS?

there are more than enough people in this country that speak Vietnamese. it would be no trouble at all to get a translation from a native speaker that is also fluent in English. A lot of these native-Vietnamese-speaking people are software gurus and many probably work for Micros~1. One guy I worked with, a PFY at the time, went on to work for Sony, on Playstation development last I heard. i think it was on his Linked-in page. A 'dream job' for a gamer.

more than likely, as stated in the article: they have elected themselves the arbiters of what is 'responsible.'

References to "Cancel Culture" need not be explicitly stated.

We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether

bombastic bob Silver badge
Pirate

Re: It just goes to show ...

I was thinking "it sounds kinda similar to a Ponzi scheme" but who knows... or the Tulip Madness in Amsterdam a few centuries ago.

This kind of thing ALSO sounds like a way to LAUNDER MONEY...

* criminal "sells" something under the table to a buyer

* Buyer THEN purchases NFT at agreed-upon price from "seller"

* Transaction appears legit on the surface, and there's now a precedent for paying huge prices for something that has no actual worth.

Expect more of same. This is kinda obvious, not like they did not already think of this...

Jailed Samsung boss accused of abusing Propofol aka ‘the milk of amnesia’ or 'the drug that killed Michael Jackson'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

generally, within the USA, illegal drug USE is treated much differently than trafficking them.

A typical example, someone addicted to opioids who obtains them illegally is caught, but then is ordered to a rehab rather than a prison. Still convicted of a crime [illegal drug posession], but the end result is a hell of a lot different. Now, breaking the deal can get you that jail time you avoid by going to rehab, but at least the judge is focusing on TREATMENT instead of PUNISHMENT.

You wouldn’t know my new database, she goes to another school: Oracle boasts of earthshattering tech the outside world cannot see

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

PostgreSQL

worthy of mention as an alternative database in the article

And someone offered (free?) porting of applications? Interesting! Ok maybe not free then... but still.

Another Windows 10 patch that breaks printers ups ante to full-on Blue Screen of Death

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Printers are the bain of MS's world

Perhaps MS should just adopt CUPS.

I can't give you ENOUGH THUMBS UP for THAT one!!!

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Printers are the bain of MS's world

yeah but in the USA, corporate taxes are due in 4 days, and personal ones in a little over a month.

It's typical that you need to print out at least SOMETHING to process them, even when you e-file.

Breaking printers *NOW* [especially when THE! UPDATES! ARE! FORCED!] is likely to create a LOT OF CHAOS.

Unfortunately this year the corporate tax software won't even install on Windows 7, and there WAS NO CLOUD OPTION. I'm glad I (held my nose and choked back the bile) and chose 8.1 instead of 10 for the VM (running on that same Windows 7 machine) that I used for processing it. God help us all if those tax programs REQUIRE Win-10-NIC some day...

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: XX is faster than Yy ?

Yes, _I_ would choose a browser that:

* Does not look like Chrome's 2D FLATTY McFLATSO FLATASS interface

* Has colorful 3D looking buttons and icons in the toolbar, NOT flatty-flatty-2D-by-four ones

* Has non-hamburger-menu TRADITIONAL interface BY DEFAULT

* Does not choke on excessive Javascript NOR fail to re-load included (script, css) files when you hit 'refresh' (the last bit being for authoring purposes)

* Includes a built-in "NoScript" like feature, and isolated tabs in different processes if you want

* Has a simple built-in 'regular expression' (or similar) way of filtering DNS requests and returning blank content for a user-config ad-block and DNS-block system, such as a list including ".*ads.*" to block

and so on. that's kinda what my wish list looks like for a browser.

Hey - if FIREFOX ABANDONED AUSTRALIS, and made the interface LOOK LIKE IT WAS BEFORE, I think people would WANT IT!!! Plugins could handle the rest.

License to thrill: Ahead of v13.0, the FreeBSD team talks about Linux and the completed toolchain project that changes everything

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: @bombastic bob - Says it all

the extra cost of a "GPL compliance web page" has little to do with my point.

The extra cost is typically in hardware. You sometimes have to add extra things to hardware to enable GPL compliance with respect to boot loaders [mentioned] and the OS itself [mentioned].

If you design a piece of hardware with, let's say, an ARM processor from a well known vendor [read: Microchip] you may not want to include additional JTAG hardware on the circuit board that is needed for end-users to program it. You may ALSO not want to expose a serial port that would make it possible to recover an attempt to re-build and re-install the OS, that fails [or to boot into single-user mode from a console so you can complete an installation of a kernel and userland]. Sure, your internal test systems would have these capabilities, but NOT the ones shipping out the door. "Extra cost".

You would have to consider the amount of engineering effort that goes into lowering the BOM cost by just a nickel... and it's JUSTIFIABLE when shipping "that many units".

From a pure software consideration you can make your claim, sure, and maybe even be smug about it. When you consider "the big picture", not so much.

I have done designs using Atmel CPUs that deliberately avoid GPL so that you don't have to support programming them by end-users. And I've done GPL versions as well, and had to cleverly jump through hoops to make it possible to program a necessarily GPL bootloader without access to a PDI header [it was potted in epoxy and operated under water]. So yeah, I have a pretty good perspective on what it might take from the hardware design as well as the software. There's a cost.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Says it all

With respect to GPL...

If you are shipping an embedded system, sometimes it carries an EXTRA COST to make it possible for end-users to modify and load the modified version of the software (in this case the OS and userland applications) as required by GPL. Even though FreeBSD is _ALREADY_ open source, and you haven't really modified nor customized anything, shipping a binary-only end product can be a LOT simpler and less of a hassle than having to deal with boot loaders, un-bricking, and build environments.

That being said, if most of that is done FOR you [such as using an RPi and Raspbian/Raspberry OS] then you don't have to concern yourself too much with that OTHER than being forced to update to a moving target to fix problems. Having something shipped as a binary makes certain aspects of updates easier and possibly MORE RELIABLE, as long as you take responsibilty for it.

It's really a matter of cost benefit. FreeBSD on an appliance can greatly improve that. Good examples are router/firewalls, and NAS devices (based on FreeNAS, which I understand is a derivative of FreeBSD). You don't have to deal with a ZFS licensing as you would under Linux, and driver BLOB libraries that would create other licensing issues with Linux, etc.. Even a closed source proprietary driver is possible to ship with the OS, if intellectual property or government regulations demand it. Linux is NOT perfect at dealing with these real-world problems, particularly with its DEMAND for GPL compliance and "non-tainted" kernels.

Additionally, with FreeBSD, there is _NO_ _SYSTEMD_ - and also no /sys nor /proc by default (/proc can be mounted, not sure about /sys, but it's a bit different than Linux). So when POSIX applications are written that ASSUME LINUX (aka 'Linux-isms') they have to be ported to run on FreeBSD to compensate for the poor assumptions made by the authors.

And then, of course, there are FreeBSD-only features like jails and the built-in [text only unfortunately] hypervisor bhyve, plus Linux userland binary compatbility [32-bit AND 64-bit Linux on 64-bit FreeBSD] and a few other things not mentioned in the article. Jails are superior to merely using chroot since you get a DIFFERENT security context (i.e. different root password, or any other user/password for that matter) and you can limit the /dev entries that show up in the jail [and there are a few other things that can't be done from within a jail].

Anyway, probably enough for one post.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Thanks

I was testing it periodically a while back, and giving feedback to the devs. They were beginning to focus on gnome 3 though and I was more interested in seeing gnome 2 continue and become uber-stable, which it came close to doing, and then move forward with mate, so I kinda lost interest over the whole gnome 3 path.

But the good news is that GhostBSDs live CD/DVD setup method works pretty well, last I tried it.

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "we don't have one big dictator"

it's more of a consensus among similarly-thinking people, actually... from directly dealing with them. I've contributed a couple of things, in the kernel and in userland, jumped through the hoops and complied with their standards to get things approved, and so on. it works. Not as bureaucratic as it could be, but generally everyone just wants quality and maintainable code.

So it appears some of you really don't want us to use the word 'hacker' when we really mean 'criminal'

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Hacking is honourable

Watching the news is like watching childrens TV

That's pretty much why I listen to talk radio to stay informed, though Tucker, Hannity, Ingraham, Watters, Pirro, Levin, and Guttfeld get my TV viewing time.

(and I think they all still say 'hackers' to describe criminals that hack)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Quantum Leaps

I was thinking more of a TV series from the 80's with Scott Bakula

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: Hacking is honourable

well, certain newsgroups on USENET came to this conclusion a long time ago (back in the 90's), that in particular, white-hat hacking is what most hackers do, and that grey hat is also somewhat common, but black hat is what criminals do, and it's pretty UNcommon. The idea was that 'hacking' was generally not evil, nor hackers. But I think most people 'get it' nowadays so there's no actual image problem associated with the word 'hacker'.

That being said I don't take offense at anyone calling certain kinds of criminals "hackers", or calling what they do 'hacking', even though I am a hacker of the white-hat (with a touch of grey) variety.

Too many people are too easily offended by too many insignificant things, almost to the extent of GOING OUT OF YOUR WAY to *FIND* a way to be offended, then getting all CANCEL CULTURE about it.

And I _REALLY_ _HATE_ political correctness and cancel culture anyway. And so I choose not to participate.

Or you can just say 'crackers' to differentiate hackers from the criminal types, if you want. Whatever.

Sign of the primes: Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Not blocking bad stuff coming in?

yes this code signing thing has worked SO well for MS Windows...

</snark>

NASA shows Mars that humans can drive a remote control space tank at .01 km/h

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: "...sped along at the astounding velocity of .01km/hr..."

Having been there at the wrong time of day a few times, I can totally understand...

(Don't know whether the 405 or the 10 is worse)

Was thinking, though, given the 200 meter range of the rover, are they using too low of a power level for the comms? Maybe should use xx Watt or better transmitters instead of BTLE equivalent (an extreme comparison)?

/me points out that packet bursts don't need that much power to transmit, because of the short duty cycle involved - but a STRONG receiver for weak signals MIGHT use more current than higher watt burst transmitters as they must run continuously. And more current for less noise in the front end.

Also used to work for a company that made electronically steerable wifi antennas. NASA probably invented stuff like that back in the day for AEGIS cruisers in the 80's [phased arrays etc.]. So with directional antennas and steering/scanning you could easily increase the antenna gain by 10db or more, especially in a relatively flat area without vertical things in the way. 200m is like the range you'd get with a standard wifi in a clear field with no other transmitters and an omni antenna. Then again maybe it's got that kind of steering antenna tech already [something better than wifi diversity]. Worth pointing out, MIMO doesn't work well in a clear field - it needs multipath which means reflections actually help. Ah, hell, maybe I could recommend some RF and antenna engineers [not me I did the software] to assist with the next rover, especially a flying one, to extend its range.

Because there's really NO reason, other than communication loss, to limit how far it can roam.

Intel CPU interconnects can be exploited by malware to leak encryption keys and other info, academic study finds

bombastic bob Silver badge
Meh

Re: I am really weird

re: XBox 360 processor - I thought they were Power PC CPUs though...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_(processor)

(not made by Intel as far as I can tell)

the GPU might be AMD for the early ones. I think later ones had GPU on the CPU, i.e. the XCGPU

bombastic bob Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: "Intel classified our attack as a 'traditional side channel'

more right than any other perspective, for sure. "Bottom Line" drives _EVERYTHING_.

Perl.com theft blamed on social engineering attack: Registrar 'convinced' to alter DNS records by miscreants

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

Re: Focus

From the article: a social engineering attack that convinced registrar Network Solutions to alter the domain's records without valid authorization.

Network Solutions - they're pretty much the OLDEST one out there, as i recall. Used to be 'internic'. I set up a domain with them in 1995. Still registered there, too. I was under the impression they had safety procedures in place to PREVENT this kind of thing.

Apparently they need to review their internal procedures...

Homo sapiens: Hey you, Neanderthals! Neanderthals: We heard that

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: POTS

not just telephones, but narrow band radio communications as well, limited to about 3khz. Narrow band FM is common for walkie-talkie systems, and short wave band (as I recall) is allocated in 5khz increments [unfortunately this means cross-talk at high frequencies but there ya go].

bombastic bob Silver badge
Trollface

Re: POTS

you made me think of a joke involving a Neaderthal named "Ugg"

('who's on first' style)

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Species or specious?

dogs have "breeds", and yet they're all dogs.

I suspect Neanderthal vs Human is more like that, rather than a separate species. This is more or less proved by the apparent evidence that Neanderthals and humans had viable offspring who then passed along genes from both.

[usually separate species can't mate very well, though donkey+horse = mule, and mules are normally sterile]

In any case, the similar hearing fits the concept that Neanderthal is just a "breed" of human.

Ever felt that a few big tech companies are following you around the internet? That's because ... they are

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Dogfood

my anti-tracker method is a lot easier on my end.

* assume that browser history and stored cookies are a huge part of the problem

* For "those" sites, run a browser without 'noscript' in a different security context, such as a different login entirely (i use DISPLAY=localhost:0.0 or similar and authorize via "xhost +localhost" - make sure X server runs with -listen_tcp or similar for this to work).

* The separate login's browser settings either delete history on exit, or you have a script (needed for Chrome) that deletes everything that's persistent.

* close all browser instances for that login and erase history between web sites.

Normally when I find these sites I have nothing to do with them. But occasionally an online store or even gummint resource (Cali-forn-you is bad about this) will have a CAPTCHA or some other scripty thing you can't avoid using. So I run it from "that" browser. Firefox has a setting to erase all history on exit, and that is helpful.

This as an alternative to "temporarily allow all for the current tab"

(understandably clever trackers can track you without cookies, and then put 2 and 2 together to associate that web page with everything about you, from your real name and e-mail and cell phone number, to personal data you entered for a social media account like age, sex, likes/dislikes, education and work history, and so on, and then SELL IT or use it to target ads, etc.)

1Password has none, KeePass has none... So why are there seven embedded trackers in the LastPass Android app?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Unhappy

The company says users can opt out if they want.

The company says users can opt out if they want.

Read: "It's in there somewhere, just search if you really want it"

or "Most users won't care anyway so it doesn't matter it YOU shut it off"

or "Good luck figuring out which magic buttons to press, Muahahahaha!"

or something else that's equally arrogant and/or condescending.

Tracking should be OPT IN or NOTHING. no exceptions.

Linux Mint users in hot water for being slow with security updates, running old versions

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: A bit rich

most debian-based releases have "apt-get dist-upgrade" available, but you're kinda on your own to make it work. You need to mess with the sources.list file among other things. Often worth doing, but you may have problems later...

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: How about NOT doing what Microsoft Does?

If I want updates, I'll update when I'm good and ready.

That sounds like INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY to me.

Since when has a toy maker tried to stop children from playing with the toys that they make in ways that they don't like? Yeah, it's kinda like that, isn't it?

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: So...perhaps Mint SHOULD have automatic updates turned on.

some people do not notice the icon that says that updates are needed

Other people (like me) just *DISABLE* that kind of [insert profane pejorative here] and PRACTICE SAFE SURFING instead...

NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

bombastic bob Silver badge
Linux

Re: Linux

VxWorks is an RTOS, and that's probably why it's used for things that work better with an RTOS.

I used to compile images for Vx and Linux back in the day, wifi access points specifically. Vx had a much smaller footprint but of course required license fees etc.. One day the manager said "Fit it in 2M flash and we'll use Linux." We made it work.

Australian government fights Facebook news ban by threatening 0.01% of Zuck's ad revenue

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: Just goes to show how out of touch our politicians are

post links to USENET and who's gonna stop you? Who's gonna TAX you?

As expected, pretty much everyone will AVOID the tax, or ignore paying it even when required.

wait until news links aren't posted any more. You could post something like this:

A link to "The Register" online site for an article titled "whatever" - then a simple google search... no, wait. [could they tax Google as well???]

Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

Re: What the AAIB had to say

while the Alauda gang, who 'built' this chunk of junk just come across as a bunch of incompetent fuckwits.

When you invent something, and want to show it off to the public, don't make the kinds of mistakes that Tesla did, on occasion. Mad science is cool, but doesn't play well with the public when things go horribly wrong.

It's probably best to hire a safety consultant (one that's familiar with that particular field) to come in and make sure you're following regulations and taking necessary precautions, before doing anything in public.

but yeah that's the difference between "mad science" and "industry". If you can do BOTH, like Elon Musk, then you're gonna do well if you can build the thing you're dreaming up (and it actually works and doesn't kill people or break things unintentionally). But if all of the lights are going to go out for 3 counties in all directions, or airplanes might crash, nobody out there wants to be told "RUN!". Best to avoid that, yeah.

[I've got these ideas about nuclear fusion that I'd like to try. It wouldn't be all that hard, nor even expensive, to collect enough parts and build it. Problem is radiation, neighbors' safety, and stuff like that. So I haven't]

bombastic bob Silver badge
Devil

it should be fairy easy to implement a gentle setdown if the signal is lost for a few seconds or so

Agreed. the on-board IMU [necessary for something like a quad rotor] would tell you when the thing is hovering, and then you simply have it drop at a known safe velocity.

From what i oould tell, though, they were using an Arduino Nano (or a clone) and they only have about 32k of NVRAM. Maybe the nav stuff was on a separate Pi board but still, there's _not_ a lot of code space in an Arduino Nano and, well, results were what they were...

The photos of shoddy electronics workmanship didn't make it any better. It's not THAT hard to visually QA a circuit board, and things that fly should be getting extra scrutiny. When I was in the Navy I was an ET and even went to a special soldering school where we learned to solder to NASA spec. Burned insulation and improperly mounted components would have obviously failed the visual inspection. In fact the NASA spec took into consideration a number of things from thermal and mechanical stress on wiring and solder joints, to use of a 'conformal coating' to seal it all up. As I understand it, current NASA specs also mandate leaded solder, due to unleaded solder always looking like a 'cold joint', and to help mitigate the threat of 'whiskering'.