Posts by Orv

Twitter users complain 'private' Circle posts aren't

Re: Can Twitter just die already?

I can't decide if it's a juvenile prank, or an attempt to break the lease on a building he doesn't really want anymore.

Just because on-prem is cheaper doesn’t make the cloud a money pit

Re: It's not just about the technology

That's true in business, less so in academia where money tends to come in one-time chunks. It's a lot easier to budget for the purchase of a piece of hardware (especially if you can write it into a grant) than it is to budget for ongoing subscription fees.

Re: Balance is key

I think email is one service where cloud hosting really makes a good deal of sense. It benefits a lot from economies of scale in things like training spam filters, dealing with IP blocks, etc. Running an in-house email server is a lot of work on a per-user basis, especially for a smaller company.

The issues I'm seeing lately mostly revolve around cloud storage. Free tiers are going away, and extra storage is getting more expensive. Where I work people who have committed data to services like Box and Google Drive are having to rethink their strategy. But of course for x amount of storage in house, you really need more like 3x when you take into account backups, so it's complicated.

Starlink opens final frontier for radio astronomers

Re: Sorry but no.

Last I heard Starlink was pretty well overloaded by glampers with $100,000 RVs and Musk fans who could get terrestrial service but want that shiny, shiny dish. I'm not sure how many rural people are really benefiting.

Google: If your Android app can create accounts, it better be easy to delete them, too

Re: So....

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the summary of the policy in this article is probably a severe simplification of the actual policy, which likely goes on for several pages and includes clauses in ALL CAPS.

CAN do attitude: How thieves steal cars using network bus

Re: Not an issue

When I had a VW I used to take the ignition coil lead with me.

Re: Oh my god

That's true of Teslas, which use a CAN bus extension to identify the car to the charger for billing purposes. I don't think any of the other current charging standards use CAN.

Re: And it's not just the number of wires

VW harnesses are light because VW figures out what size wire would be prudent for a circuit's amperage load, then goes down a size. This results in a very lightweight harness that also spontaneously combusts to protect the fuses.

Re: Why

Or if you're driving a car at all in the US, where most vehicles are SUVs or pickups and a lot of the latter have had their suspension raised.

Re: Why

My Volvo had a system like that. It had frequent false alarms, though, and then people would ask me why there was a warning light on my dash with a picture of a hand grenade.

Re: Why

When I drive my Honda Del Sol I always drive with my headlights on, day and night, so that the guys in big SUVs can see me. It's been proven to work for motorcycles so I figure it'll work for me too.

Picking them is often unnecessarily slow. Many car locks can be opened with a slim jim or other tool quicker than you can open them with the key. Another common trick used to be to just rip the whole lock cylinder out by its roots with a slide hammer.

Re: One big mess of bad programs and connections

There are other reasons. It reduces the amount of wiring required, especially in the case of headlights that are steerable, have bulb-out detection, or other advanced features. Tail lights benefit even more from this -- instead of having one wire for brake, one for tail, one for turn, and another for reverse running the length of the car for each tail light assembly you just have power, ground, and the CAN bus.

Re: Easily solvable....

My 1994 Honda doesn't have any of those features, either, but it's lamentably trivial to steal because its physical security features are also nonexistent.

US defense tech veterans call for a separate Cyber Force

Re: That hideous name

I'm just hoping their recruitment ads will be hilarious. "Do you cyber?"

Combine this with the Space Force, call it the CyberSpace Force. It'd be perfect for a branch that's already a monument to Trump's inner 14-year-old.

Microsoft stumps loyal fans by making OneDrive handle Outlook attachments

Re: Old email

I saw the opposite happen once -- professor had a messy divorce, his ex-wife filed a public records request for all of his work email. Which he'd been freely intermingling with his personal email. For decades.

Re: Street signs

It's not so much about that as about them getting to force you to sort through 20 years' worth of email. Especially if you have a job that's subject to public records requests. They can be used in a punitive way to eat up vast amounts of your time and budget.

two things can be true at once:

- This is a stupid and punitive policy.

- People shouldn't hoard so much email.

The first time you get a discovery request from some kind of litigation you'll wish you hadn't kept so much stuff.

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

Re: Cheaper ones will follow.

The US government hasn't been keen on attacks in Russian territory that are traceable back to US-supplied weapons, because of the whole "maybe starting WWIII" problem. If Ukraine wants to develop their own drone capability, though, I don't see the US interfering.

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

Re: how tesla screwed it up?

Bosch has been doing this forever, too. How did THEY screw it up? And how did Tesla's quality assurance not catch it?

That's not how the parking brakes on semis work. They use a (theoretically) fail-safe setup where air holds off a spring-loaded brake by applying pressure to a diaphragm. To set the parking brake you release the air from the spring brake chamber. This means any air loss will eventually apply the spring brakes. (To tow a truck with air brakes you have to "cage" the brakes by using a threaded rod to compress the springs.)

How Tesla managed to screw that up, I can't imagine. It's a simple system that's been around since God was a boy.

Pictures of Tesla semis being towed are all over trucker groups on Facebook. Since Tesla is seen as representing EVs in general this is leading to a lot of "electric trucks will never work" commentary.

Tesla ordered to pay worker $3M-plus over racist treatment

Re: Wow easy money

The public image of Tesla clearly doesn't matter much, otherwise they'd reign in Elon more. No, he thinks having other people hate the company just makes his fans want to buy from it more.

Re: Wow easy money

It's the only punishment that matters to a company the size of Tesla.

Also I dunno if I'd call it *easy* money. I mean, if you get to the point where you're being awarded millions in damages you've probably had your personal safety threatened, been psychologically abused, and had your career and earning potential artificially limited.

Cisco Moscow trashed offices as it quit Putin's putrid pariah state

Re: Goes both ways

I downvote complaints about downvoting.

Bank rewrote ads for infosec jobs to stop scaring away women

Re: Autistic People too

I once introduced someone who had been using Word for over a decade to the "Find" feature. She'd been looking for stuff in documents manually. Needless to say she was really excited.

In the old days it was a butt set and an orange vest. People would not only let you in, they'd lead you right to their communications infrastructure.

Re: Autistic People too

I'm not autistic and that's what I assume. When I scan a job ad and see something under "requirements" that I don't have, I skip to the next ad. If it's a requirement and I don't have it, they're just going to reject my resume. Or I'll get to the interview stage and we'll realize we're wasting each others' time. I mean, it's a REQUIREMENT.

When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating

Re: Buses...

Also, if you don't run the buses on a regular schedule people stop using them at all, because they're not reliable. Now you have a parking problem.

It takes me about two weeks to fill mine. Ever since COVID lockdowns the janitors only empty them on an erratic, maybe-once-per-quarter schedule, though.

New models of IBM Model F keyboard Mark II incoming

Re: mac user

Keychron's stuff is great, and by the standards of enthusiast keyboards really not that expensive. Redragon also makes some gamer keyboards with socketed switches that could be the low-cost start for a custom kitbash.

Why a top US cyber spy urges: Get religious about backups

Re: Good backup is expensive

Yeah, well. This is academia, where having a full-time IT person at all in a department is seen as dangerous overspending.

Re: The USA, religion, and backups

Yes, but have they considered post-rapture business continuity? You need at least one person on call who has sinned against the Holy Spirit and can keep the business running during the time of tribulation.

Re: Hot Off The Interweb......Stuff You Really Need To Know!!!

Sure, it's info "everyone knows." But how many actually do it?

Re: Good backup is expensive

Yup. I have trouble just going on vacation because I'm the only IT person and there's no one to back me up.

Boffins: Microgravity impacts cell repair systems in proteins

Re: Somebody did not get the memo

I just assume that in post-Brexit Britain the goal is to increase gender discrimination, not decrease it. Because the days when men and women lived in separate spheres were the glory days of the empire, right?

Re: So, good or bad

We may not know yet, but changes in cellular metabolism are rarely good for you. It's a system tuned by millions of years of evolution.

Today's old folks set to smash through longevity records

Re: "life expectancy in [the USA]"

Guns essentially remove the possibility of failing at suicide in a non-debilitating way. Some people who fail at their first suicide attempt try again and succeed, but many also get treatment and go on to full lives. A lot of people who are depressed also have suicidal ideation that they don't act on because they have no ready means of carrying it out, and the impulse passes.

Google again accused of willfully destroying evidence in Android antitrust battle

Man, it's not often you see evidence where people are basically saying,

"I'd like you to do a crime."

'Sorry, I can't, that would be a crime.'

"Well, you can wait while we do the crime. I do crime all the time."

GitHub publishes RSA SSH host keys by mistake, issues update

Re: Encrypted?

These were the host keys, which are usually not encrypted. They're used to identify the host, not to authenticate to it. If they were encrypted someone would have to enter the password every time the system was rebooted.

NASA's space nuclear power program is a hot mess

Re: understandable

Reactors that haven't been started up yet are actually not that hazardous -- the uranium fuel is not all that radioactive compared to the fission products you get later. The problem with space-borne reactors is mostly just that they're complex and have moving parts that can cause mission failures. Plutonium decay generators have none. Packaging the plutonium so it won't get dispersed in an accident is mostly a solved problem as I understand it; it's about using cladding that can survive re-entry heat.

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

Re: Hmmm

You don't, that's kind of the point. All you can do is plug in a cable and then browse for the file. Assuming everything trusts everything else and Windows decides the phase of the moon is correct for it to assign a functional drive letter.

Re: Hmmm

I have extensive tools on my computer for manipulating images, but the tools on the phone are often plenty good. Especially on my iPhone, where I can take a screen shot, crop it, annotate it, and send it to someone without having to go through the extra step of sending it to my computer.

While I'm at it I'll also note that transferring a photo from Android to a Windows machine is needlessly clumsy because they have no equivalent to Apple's Airdrop functionality.

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Hallucination is a big problem, partly because current chatbots lack the ability to say "i don't have sufficient information" or even just "I don't know." They're designed to always give a response even if they have to wing it.

BBC to staff: Uninstall TikTok from our corporate kit unless you can 'justify' having it

Re: If they want to be consistent..

"Currently" is doing a lot of work there.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

I've had the same thought, just based on the sheer amount of copyrighted software they have available. This sort of lawsuit seemed like it was bound to happen.

Workers don't want these humanoid robots telling them to be happy

Someone needs to go talk to the Care Hound.

Re: Apologies from a railway computer

Or sitting on hold being told every 30 seconds that your call is very important to them.