* Posts by Orv

1936 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Aug 2007

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

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Re: Some elements of the operating system simply do not work

It...doesn't? At least, no macOS machine I've used ever has, and I've used some pretty unconventional desktop setups.

Mind you, if it's a managed machine then your institution's MDM server may be pushing a profile that locks that stuff down.

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Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

Sure, if you want to neuter half the bundled apps.

Who buys a desktop or laptop in order to use the bundled apps? I sure as hell don't use any of the bundled apps on Windows, because they're all trash.

Employees saved Musk from himself over Twitter Files

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Re: Retrospective self serving establishment spin

Your claims would have carried more weight if you'd made them a couple weeks ago, before we found out the FBI informant most interested in pushing the Hunter Biden story was a Russian agent.

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Idiots

In Netflix's case, that was absolutely the plan from the start and they weren't quiet about it. Right from the beginning, when they were still a DVD rental service, they said they were planning to have a) online streaming, and b) their own studio.

I also think they'd have been happy to keep streaming other people's stuff as well, if they could, but studios decided they'd rather try launching their own streaming service so they could control the whole stack.

I say this not to defend Netflix -- I wouldn't still be a subscriber if I didn't get it for free with my cell phone service -- but because I think it's interesting that they outlined their plans right from the start.

Flipper Zero takes to the big screen

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The ads I've seen for the Flipper seem like hype and haven't impressed me. Oh boy, I can annoy people at bars by messing around with the TVs. How...exciting. Oh boy, I can clone my RFID tap-badge at work...that surely won't get me fired.

Alaska Airlines' door-dropping flight was missing bolts

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Re: Eavesdroppers from the FAA

As far as I know, no, it's just a continual 2 hour loop. This used to be done with an endless loop of magnetic tape.

Keep in mind the main purpose of these things originally is to have some information in the event of an "everyone's dead" kind of accident, where there are no witnesses to interview.

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Flight crews would prefer that only conversations related to an incident be available; they don't want every single thing they say in the cockpit to be available to review and dissect later. The 2 hours is a compromise. There's an FAA proposal to extend to 25 hours, but there's some resistance from the pilots' unions.

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It's also possible it gradually "walked" up until it was high enough to pop out, through some kind of slip/stick mechanism. The whole fuselage expands slightly when the plane pressurizes so there could be all kinds of weird interactions.

Elon Musk can't wriggle out of SEC Twitter fraud inquiry

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Re: The Problem with being a Public Company

"Literally forced to" is a funny way to write "signed an agreement to do, then tried to weasel out of what he'd signed."

Tesla power steering probe upgraded after thousands more incidents reported

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These days a lot of cars use electric steering assist, so they're already dealing with both hardware and software.

I look a little askance at steer-by-wire too, but there are some real advantages. For example, crash safety is easier if you don't have a metal rod poking up into the cabin. Also, one of the bigger challenges in packaging a car is having to place the steering rack where there's a good angle for a shaft to the steering wheel; even things like engine accessories have to be planned around it.

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I think they have redundant power systems and that's enough. I've seen it described as steer-by-wire in several places.

Hydraulic-only steering was already legal in every state except maybe Tennessee, last I looked.

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Re: Lucky for them...

This is a little more serious than a loss of power steering -- it seems the steering racks are locking up and blocking manual steering, as well.

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

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Re: HP Toner

I think LED page printers went out of fashion because laser printer mechanisms became cheap enough to overtake them. Probably due to higher volume; LED printers were never a big part of the market.

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I sourced the last one from Office Depot, not some random site, so I assumed it'd be legit. It started streaking almost immediately. The problem is they don't replace the imaging drum portion of the cartridge, they just refill it with toner powder, so you're always getting someone else's worn-out drum.

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On the one hand, HP should let me use whatever I want in their printers. On the other hand, every refilled toner cartridge I've ever bought turned out to be complete junk -- I was usually lucky to get 1/4 the service life for 2/3 the price of a "genuine" cartridge. So I just can't get too worked up about this, given that refilled cartridges seem to be complete scams.

Can solar power be beamed down from space? Yes. Is it commercially viable? Not yet

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Re: 13sq km of mirrors to heat 3 boilers to 560C

Once you've spread out the power enough to avoid being harmful, haven't you just made your receiving antenna impractically large? At a certain point you might as well just deploy solar panels because they'd be smaller.

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Re: Alternative uses

I gather a lot of the bird kills were avoided when they started defocusing the beam when not in use. Apparently initially they were just focusing it above the tower during shutdowns, creating a dangerous "hot spot" in the air.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

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Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

I mean, if it's so stupid, don't watch. To say you're entitled to it for free because it's so stupid is trying to have it both ways.

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Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

As someone who supports a web service that doesn't use ads...I still hate ad/script blockers. It's hard to troubleshoot user issues when they're randomly blocking parts of your application.

NASA, Lockheed Martin reveal subtly supersonic X-59 plane

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Re: Unwieldy

I think the goal is supersonic business jets for the ultra-wealthy, not airliners.

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Re: And fuel cost per passenger would be...?

This isn't meant to enable large SSTs for the masses, this is tech for small supersonic business jets for billionaires. They don't care about fuel consumption.

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windshields can ice up too. Many of the solutions we have for that work equally well on cameras.

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Re: Douglas X-3 Stiletto, anybody?

I wouldn't hazard a guess. Once you exceed the speed of sound aerodynamics gets deeply weird.

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Re: Slow down

Technically there's no crime called "insurrection." That's one of the issues that has to be sorted out. It seems likely the ultimate finding will be that the 14th Amendment is not self-executing and Congress dropped the ball by not passing a law spelling out what counts as an insurrection and who decides.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

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I worked at a place that had a contract programmer that did something similar, except his comments indicated how many beers he'd had before he wrote the code in question.

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Re: Code comments

I had to write some Delphi code to print some documents from disk files -- literally dump the files straight to the print queue, since they were pre-rendered HPGL plots. Pressed for time and in too much of a hurry to figure out the complexities of the Windows printing system, I threw in a system call to the DOS PRINT command with a comment along the lines of:

{ This is a hack and will need to be replaced by correct code later. }

I left that job a few years later with the program still working. About a decade after that, the company contracted me to make some changes to my code to fix a couple of issues they'd run into...one of which ended up being due to that line.

Disease X fever infects Davos: WEF to plan response to whatever big pandemic is next

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Re: Obligatory masks when coughing

I promise you no one else will catch my allergies, whether I'm wearing a mask or not.

Adios, dead zones: Starlink relays SMS in space for unmodified phones on Earth

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Re: ...our link budget closes...

I was skeptical they could do Doppler compensation effectively enough, since they'd have to do it all from one end.

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Re: T-Mobile?

My wife got a 5G phone and found that it worked much more reliably if she set it to 4G only.

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Re: Now you'll never have an excuse for missing that weekend work text or call

I've had jobs where that worked, and jobs where I was explicitly supposed to be available 24x7 unless I had a really good excuse.

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Re: Resend, resend, resend, ...

Doesn't Apple already have something like this?

The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April

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I'm about to dump all my CDs. I long ago ripped them all, I have multiple backups, and I'm tired of lugging that heavy box around every time I move.

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Re: IBM's doomed operating system

Yeah, I like Apple's touchpads, but if I want a mouse I generally plug in something made by Logitech.

One caveat about right-clicking on the Magic Mouse -- it often has both buttons set to "primary" by default, making it seem like a 1-button mouse. You can fix it in System Preferences.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

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The hole is for an emergency exit door. Not all configurations need all the doors, but that shouldn't matter -- if having a hole there with a door in it doesn't weaken the fuselage too much to be safe, then the same hole with a plug in it shouldn't either.

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Re: 777X Cargo Door Blown Out

Probably not. A few planes over the years have had occasional issues with cargo door latching mechanisms -- including the 747, 777, and DC-10. But this was a door *plug*, so it had no latching mechanism -- it was supposed to be bolted in place.

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Embraer's safety record is surprisingly good considering their planes are mostly flow by lower-time regional pilots who are still working their way up to the big leagues.

Airbus has had the odd bit of trouble what with confusing autopilot UI, cross-wired control sticks, crashes caused by blocked static ports, and carbon fiber vertical stabilizers that snap off if you use the rudder too enthusiastically.

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Re: Shameful

Two-engine jets are *supposed* to be able to continue to climb on one engine, even if the failure occurs right after takeoff. Mind you this doesn't help if the second engine fails too, but that's pretty rare.

As an aside, this is why two-engine jets often climb out faster than four-engine jets. A two-engine jet has to have a higher power-to-weight ratio with all engines lit, since it has to be able to cope with losing 50% of its power, whereas a 4-engine jet only has to be able to survive losing 25%.

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Re: I hope they also covered

Alaska Airlines charges extra for seats like that with extra legroom. The most likely reason is it wasn't a full flight and no one wanted to pay up.

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Re: A gross understatement?

Nearly every nut and bolt on an aircraft will have some means of being locked in place to make sure it can't work loose. Deformable washers (with one-use tabs you bend up to trap the nut flats) and drilled or castellated nuts with safety wire are two really common methods. Something else went wrong here.

AI flips the script on fingerprint lore – maybe they're not so unique after all

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Re: "Discovery could have implications for the field of forensics"

We've known for a while now that they aren't sufficiently unique -- for example, Brandon Mayfield being falsely accused of the 2004 Madrid train bombing.

Data wrangler Zuckerberg becomes world's least likely cattle rancher

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I thought the Angus beef fad had mostly played out. I feel like he's jumping in kinda late.

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

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Re: Mount Inaccessible

On Everest? Probably find bags of poop and dead climbers.

Nearly 200 Boeing 737 MAX 9 airplanes grounded after door plug flies off mid-flight

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Re: Door plug flies off mid-flight ö

I think the relevant question is probably "what does the checklist tell them to do?" In an emergency that's what they're going to follow. No one is going to stop in the middle of limping a damaged aircraft back to the runway and think, "wait, should we pull the CVR breaker?" The CVR is mostly intended to cover incidents where the flight crew is no longer alive to be interviewed, so the last couple hours before the recorder loses power are usually plenty.

I'm also reminded of FedEx Express 705, where a dead-heading crew member attacked the flight crew with a hammer. He actually pulled the CVR breaker before takeoff hoping the cause of the crash wouldn't be determined, but the flight engineer noticed the breaker and turned it back on, thinking it had been forgotten in the pre-flight check.

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Re: oh it will not propogate

Because it's an opening engineered into the pressure vessel, with all the necessary reinforcement to make sure it doesn't become a stress concentration.

This is different than a failure that starts with a crack, where the tip of the crack becomes a stress concentration that continues the failure.

It's like pulling on a piece of paper with a round hole punched in it vs. pulling on a piece of paper with a tear in the edge. The torn piece will finish tearing quite easily.

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Alaska will now be charging extra to NOT sit in an exit row.

Apple sets new 16,000-foot iPhone drop test after 737 fuselage fail

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Re: No one really needs to know that; that's OLD news...

Every news article I've seen has mentioned it, sometimes in the headline.

Ransomware payment ban: Wrong idea at the wrong time

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Re: Wrong

I know of at least one organization that had full backups, but realized that the amount of time it would take to restore the contents of every single computer in their organization from backup would be disastrous. They ended up paying the ransom so they could avoid the prolonged downtime.

When people verify backups they usually check that they can restore individual machines, but hardly anyone benchmarks a restore and then multiplies it by the number of systems they own...

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Re: Hospitals

Air-gapping devices works great until someone brings in a USB drive. And it pretty much ensures they'll never get updated, so they'll be a nice soft target when that happens.

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Re: Hospitals

These gangs have names and brands, and weirdly enough, reputations. If they don't deliver decryption keys people stop paying them.

'Only 700 new IT jobs' were created in US last year

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I'm sure they'll still let in the full quota of H1B workers. Gotta keep those salaries down.