Posts by Orv

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: A tragic and rather absurd death

I don't. Am I 100% sure I drive at a slow enough crawl that I'd notice a bridge at the bottom of a dip was gone, when the guardrails are still there to suggest one is still present? No, I'm not.

Re: A tragic and rather absurd death

A heavy downpour is a situation where you expect potential trouble, though. Most people don't drive at a crawl every time it's dark out just in case a bridge that's marked on the map turns out to not be there anymore.

Google Maps for La Conchita, California still shows street numbers for properties that have been buried under a landslide since 2005.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

The "landowner" in this case is probably the state or county government, which is largely immune to civil lawsuits.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

It's just to add Streetview pics, as far as I can tell. It's not hard to find areas where the streetview data and the marked roads on the map don't line up.

That used to be true of Waze, but as it got more popular they locked down more and more of the map. It's a bit of Wikipedia situation where you have to deal with moderators who may be unreachable, or may have oddball opinions about what should be there.

Re: Were there no signs indicating that the Bridge was out?

Google may ultimately be found to not be liable, but it's standard practice in cases like this to make everyone who might have liability a party to the lawsuit.

After one of our big earthquakes in California, a couple CHPs died this way. They topped a rise in the pre-dawn twilight, and could see the road cresting the next hill, but didn't realize that the road in between those two points had ceased to exist.

Technically speaking you should always drive such that you can stop within the distance you can see; but in real life, almost none of us drive that way on the highway.

Especially at night, when you expect the bottom of a dip in the road to be dark.

California passes bill to set up one-stop data deletion shop

Re: Airtag for illicit goods

I'm pretty sure the airtags also have serial numbers, which might be traceable through the purchasing chain.

Microsoft to kill off third-party printer drivers in Windows

I haven't had to think about setting up print filters in ages, and I love it. ;)

Linux printing has gotten a lot better since most distributions switched to CUPS with sane defaults.

Very true. I don't buy inkjets anymore because they always end up clogged. I try to only get laser printers with network interfaces, and most of those will have proper support.

Re: Oh gawd no,

I worked at a place like that. We tried to consolidate everyone onto workgroup printers, but were told it was a sign of status to have a printer in your office.

Re: Confused

It's gotten easier since most printers added native PDF support in order to support AirPrint. In a lot of cases, even if CUPS doesn't have a specific driver, you can just select "CUPS PDF" as the driver and things will work fine.

Re: This is The Register

Eh, this is an area where Apple really does have the edge. macOS uses CUPS and printing -- even network printing -- mostly just works. If you have a big network or different subnets where you can't use Bonjour it gets slightly more complicated, but only slightly. All of our network printers at work can be added to macOS just by selecting AirPrint as the protocol and putting in the printer's hostname. Everything else happens automatically.

Any printer that supports AirPrint accepts PDF as a native format, so you can skip quite a few steps there and just send the PDF via IPP or whatever protocol you find makes sense to you.

Re: by 2027 – except for security-related fixes – no printer driver updates will be allowed

Pretty sure Windows has a LaserJet 4100N driver built in, though, doesn't it? If you're using a third-party HP driver for a printer that age, you're doing it wrong.

Re: It is a good thing

Windows already has good built-in drivers for most printers from that era, though.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

Re: MAX anyone?

On the other hand there's the whole "if you use the rudder too much it'll snap off" thing. There was also that A320 that nearly crashed because they cross-wired the roll channel on the pilot's stick.

I don't like window seats on single-aisle planes because of the way the curve of the fuselage pushes in on me. Widebodies are better because the radius is larger. But that complaint is easily dealt with by booking an aisle seat.

Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

I've become a tablet-with-kickstand plus Bluetooth keyboard person. Or, if I'm really traveling light, phone plus Bluetooth keyboard. I found a laptop made my shoulder bag heavier than I cared to carry around, especially by the time I added other necessities of travel.

If I want more computing power than that I can remote into my desktop. No point in lugging it around with me.

Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?

Re: Forced-fed???

There are a lot of concepts in academia that just don't exist in private sector payroll systems, is the tricky bit. People in the private sector don't go on sabbaticals, they don't have their positions routinely terminated and then re-instated four months later, they don't have pay rates that vary with credit load, they don't get paid partially out of grant funds and partially out of general funds, etc. You can make that stuff work (we have), but only at the cost of a lot more busy work on the part of the people managing payroll. You end up with people whose only job is to manually shove changes into PeopleSoft that it can't track on its own. Our hiring process has actually gotten slower and more complicated in order to accommodate the software.

But Oracle always gets the nod because they're seen as the "safe" choice. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" has become "no one ever got fired for giving a contract to Oracle."

I feel your pain. We only recently got rid of our last mainframe-based systems -- by the end we were literally in a situation where all the data was accessible by web but people needed a 3270 terminal emulator to change their password. I got to remove MochSoft TN3270 from my software distribution system just least year.

We went through this recently at a university I work for. It worked out in the end, but a lot of damage was done in the process of trying to hammer academic payroll requirements into an Oracle Peoplesoft-shaped hole.

I knew of another uni that moved their payroll off a 1970s IBM mainframe. Just figuring out all the subtle business rules embedded in all that undocumented COBOL code took a long time.

Linux 6.6's in-kernel SMB networking server graduates

Re: Bootnote

Ah, that's pretty cool. I'm in an academic environment with clients spanning a few different subnets, so I tend to avoid Bonjour. It works great for a home or small office setup where everyone is on the same subnet and VLAN, though.

Re: Bootnote

Right, if you set "quota=300G", the dataset can't exceed 300 GB *including snapshots*. Using "refquota=300G" instead means snapshots don't count against the quota. Time Machine gets a little confused if it starts deleting old backups and doesn't see any new space appear. ;)

Good point on fruit:resource. I haven't added that because this server is strictly for Time Machine backups, so it just ends up with a bunch of sparsebundle files. I'm considering setting up another one to replace our macOS file server, and if I do I'll definitely check out that option.

Re: Bootnote

You can do Time Machine backups to SMB shares -- I have it working for a few dozen computers, backing up to a FreeBSD system with ZFS storage. The settings that worked for me:

Global:

vfs objects = acl_xattr catia fruit streams_xattr

fruit:metadata = stream

fruit:model = MacSamba

fruit:posix_rename = yes

fruit:zero_file_id = yes

And then per share:

fruit:time machine = yes

Each share is restricted using "valid users" to a username unique to each machine, so they can't read each others' backups.

I take timed ZFS snapshots, so that a machine infected by ransomware can't encrypt all of its own backups.

You need to use refquotas to keep things under control, since Time Machine will keep adding backups until the disk is full, then delete the oldest ones. (If you use straight quotas it won't work because deleting files won't delete the snapshots, and thus will never free up any space for the client.)

I've successfully done Migration Assistant restores from this setup. It's slow, but within normal bounds for Time Machine.

Twitter says it may harvest biometric, employment data from its addicts

Re: Phrenology for the 21st Century

I'll just get a prosthetic forehead and wear it on my real head.

This is a growth industry -- *everybody* wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads.

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

Re: The sytemd-free ecology

Dell sells some of their systems with Ubuntu as an option. They'll even give you a (very small) discount for selecting it instead of Windows.

With version 117, Firefox finally speaks Chrome's translation language

Re: As long as

Maybe they found that, like the story author, a lot of people were sticking with Chrome just for the translation feature.

Re: I use it everyday.

I use it some on macOS but it seems to make my computers processor fans scream a lot more often than Chrome. Not a scientific test but since the two are roughly equivalent feature-wise I'm not invested enough to figure out the details.

Re: FF convert

You apparently didn't read the whole thing, because the affiliate link stuff was in there. Did you stop reading when you saw that the author of the article opposed Prop 8, or something?

FreeBSD can now boot in 25 milliseconds

Re: The bubble has burst

Bubble sort also outperforms most (but not all) other sorts when the list is already sorted, or nearly so.

Re: VM vs Process

I think this probably makes sense in cloud scenarios where you're often paying by the minute for resources consumed. You don't want extra computing power just lying around sucking up billable minutes.

Re: The bubble has burst

If your list of items to sort is *very* short (as it seems to have been at first), then bubblesort can actually be faster.

I've also seen situations where a "worse" sorting algorithm ran faster because it fit entirely in processor cache, whereas a more sophisticated sort did not.

Tesla's purported hands-free 'Elon mode' raises regulator's blood pressure

Re: Safer roads.

I've seen a lot of videos that seem to show that Tesla's system doesn't reliably detect pedestrians, bicycle riders, or even motorcycles. (There are at least two open investigations into Teslas on autopilot that just plowed right into motorcyclists without reacting.)

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

Yes, pedestrians should look both ways. But drivers also need to put down their phones, and stop doing things like accelerating into right turns while looking left.

Re: I for one can't wait till this works

More than one self-driving car advocate has proposed mandatory radio beacons for pedestrians and bicyclists.

University cuts itself off from internet after mystery security snafu

The last time I remember this happening was back in the 1990s, when they had a fire in the UPS battery room of their NOC. They were down for days after that one.

Re: Confused.......

It's the classic debate: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" vs. "put all your eggs in one basket, and then WATCH THAT BASKET."

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

Re: All this money and bother, for what?

In the US the problem with public housing isn't so much that there isn't money for it (although that is "a" problem.) The insurmountable difficulty is no one wants it to be built near anything they own, and homeowners have outsized political influence.

Dropbox limits ‘all the storage you need’ unlimited plan, blames abusive users

Re: the company saw more of this abusive behavior

Parking on the street I live on is free, but if someone decided to park twenty cars there I think people would object.

Re: Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

(Actually I just ran across a review that clocked the transfer rate as 9 MB/minute, which is even worse than my calculation -- that's a little over 150 KB/second.)

I work at a university and there are rumors that Google decided to withdraw our unlimited storage contract after a single user managed to store 2 PB (yes, petabytes) worth of backups on it.

Re: Only YouTube left with infinite storage?

It's worth noting the data rate for that system wasn't great by modern standards. It was something like 4 GB on a 2 hour tape, which works out to around 570 KB/second.

Re: The limit on M365 OneDrive is 25TB these days

I disagree that backups are easy, at least not if you do it right. One of the drivers of cloud storage abuse where I work was people trying to set up off-site backups, which is not cheap or easy. We have an on-site data center but nothing off-site.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

Re: Where are the backups?

Sure, but if you're just leaving them in a tape library they're not a "backup" by Doctor Syntax's definition, since they could be loaded and written to at any time. To meet their full definition the tapes have to be removed, write protected, and then hauled to another site.

Re: "Simple Tape"

Our DDS drive seemed to need cleaning almost constantly; I'm boggling at the idea that someone could just leave one tape in the thing for 2 years.

Re: "Simple Tape"

Back in the 1990s, I used to work at a bank that dealt with this by having the sysadmin put the previous week's backup tape set in the trunk of his car every Friday. This did technically create off-site backups, but it always seemed to me that there were security implications. It also didn't do those fragile DDS tapes much good.