Posts by Orv

UK officials caught napping ahead of 2G and 3G doomsday

Re: Going to be awkward

The higher protocols don't necessarily mean higher frequencies. It's just that you won't get the speed benefits of 5G on lower frequencies, where there's less bandwidth.

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

If he can get the gross weight over 8,500 pounds, then it's officially a Heavy Duty Vehicle and most of the safety rules that apply to Light Duty Vehicles go away.

Re: According to Musk, fraud is protected under the 1st Amendment

It'll be fine for the driver and passengers in the Cybertruck if they hit a car, because the Cybertruck will cannibalize the crumple zones of the other vehicle. It will go less well if they hit a brick wall or other immovable object.

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Re: Vicious circle with high demand

And even at that a lot of drivers are quitting. Uber relies on people being too foolish to realize they won't make back what they pay in fuel, vehicle depreciation, and insurance costs; once people have done it for a while and realize they're losing money, they quit. Uber is starting to run out of fools.

Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

Re: I have doubts about this. The numbers look excessive.

I assume in this case "activist science" means "science I don't agree with."

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

Re: NerdRageQuit

You're assuming they had an IT department other than this one guy.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: Early stage dementia?

I'm looking forward to finding out which Elon we get at the Cybertruck launch today. Will it be Happy Elon? Will it be depressed "we dug our own grave" earnings call Elon? Will it be combative "go fuck yourself" Elon? We won't know for another hour!

Goldman sacked: Apple 'wants out' of credit card collab

Banks work under all kinds of regulations Apple probably doesn't want to deal with.

USB Cart of Death: The wheeled scourge that drove Windows devs to despair

Re: USB

Sometimes they skip the "modify" step. I have a stack of USB drives that all give their manufacturer as "VendorCo".

Stop shaming service providers for outages, argues APNIC chief scientist

Re: Question from someone who isn't a lawer:

In the US at least, yes, airlines are required to participate in investigations. There's also a safety program where pilots are encouraged to voluntarily report "near misses" and other incidents that might not rise to the level of a formal investigation; information they report this way can't be used against them in any kind of license action, so there's a strong incentive to participate.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Most of the online backup services are just repackaging Amazon S3 or similar.

Do we really need another non-open source available license?

Re: mag tape was free?

Yeah, that struck me as odd too. I have a QIC cartridge of Maple V, which required a site license.

Re: What planet are we on ?

Google runs Javascript in your browser under restrictive licenses, which according to RMS is an abomination.

Re: Financialisation versus origination

Open Source brought that popular feature of the creative industry, the unpaid internship, to the software world.

Re: Monies

It doesn't, but it's also become something of an unpaid internship for programmers. What question gets asked on nearly every job application? "List your Git repositories"

Ubuntu Budgie switches its approach to Wayland

Re: Thing I found surprising about Wayland

Hasn't been a thing in a long time. X.org server has its fingers in a lot of different pies too, mostly in the name of efficiency.

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

Certainly a major step forward in his quest to ensure a place for the human white race in space.

Re: "Rapid unscheduled disassembly"

"Engine-rich combustion" is another favorite of mine.

Tool bag lost in space now tracked by garbage watchers

Re: Spanners

I accidentally launched one into the back of my van while trying to load it on a trailer, but that only disassembled the front brake lever and one footpeg.

Possibly deemed not worth the risk. Any time you have something maneuvering near the ISS under its own power, you risk a stuck thruster or maneuvering error causing it to crash into part of the station. This is also why supply vehicles don't dock under their own power, they park within reach of the Canadarm and are retrieved.

Re: Spanners

It's still one of the most common sizes they use. Almost any small bolt on a Honda car is likely to be 10mm as well. They use only a handful of sizes and they're almost all even (10, 12, 14, etc.), which makes it easy to guess which wrench you need.

Scientists use Raspberry Pi tech to protect NASA telescope data

Re: I'm reminded of early space exploration

I've often used those in auto repair to mark parts. Grease pencil for dark colored bits, Sharpie marker for light colored bits. ;)

Google dragged to UK watchdog over Chrome's upcoming IP address cloaking

Re: Child protection

There are a fair number of websites that will block or restrict your access if they detect you're using a known VPN endpoint. It becomes a bit of a game of whack-a-mole.

Cruise patches robo-taxi software to not drag humans across the road anymore

Re: Missing a vital component

In the US, truly unsupervised autonomous trains are mostly confined to situations where the right-of-way is completely off-limits to humans -- elevated railways or subways with platform doors. The technology of running the train safely is solved but not dealing with all the things that can get into an unguarded right-of-way.

US actors are still on strike – and yup, it's about those looming AI clones

Just because you can't copyright the product of an AI doesn't mean you can't copyright something a human assembled using pieces provided by an AI.

Re: Resistance is useless

If this were a viable path studios would already be casting their films with non-AI impersonators of big-name actors, and paying them next to nothing. The fact that they don't suggests they feel they need that big name on the poster to draw people in. Also, people are put off by uncanny-valley lookalikes of faces they know well.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

My experience is that computer science researchers and programmers rarely make good sysadmins, for the same reason that aircraft designers aren't necessarily good pilots. They're just different skill sets. I worked at a job where the developers initially maintained their own systems, and it was something of a disaster until most of those responsibilities were handed over to me. They were smart guys and good at setting up their development environments, but were completely uninterested in the "boring" work of running backups and installing security patches.

FAA is done with Starship's safety review, now it's over to the birds and turtles

Re: No doubt in my mind

It's Texas, people there want to obliterate the natural environment as fast as possible.

Linux will soon offer switchable x86-32 binary support

Oh man, that list of cards takes me back. Especially the Orinoco cards, which at one point were the standard thing to buy if you wanted a PCMCIA WiFi card that would work with Linux. They came in two varieties, Orinoco Gold and Orinoco Silver, depending on what level of WEP encryption they supported.

NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

To be fair the budget for Microsoft Windows 11 probably wasn't $865 million.

Re: Wanton destruction

It's got enough fuel to change its orientation. Significantly changing its *trajectory* would require a lot of fuel, though. It's got a massive amount of velocity thanks to a momentum exchange with Jupiter.

Tesla goons will buy anything – including these $150 beers

Re: IANAL

No, but you could probably take orders and then have the liquor store drop ship them.

Re: IANAL

The rules vary a lot from state to state. I'm guessing the (licensed) brewery they're working through will be responsible for distributing it.

Re: "Cybertruck, Tesla's pickup model that looks like it hasn't rendered properly"

Much like the Cybertruck, his plastic surgery really only looks good from one specific angle.

GNOME developer proposes removing the X11 session

Removing ext3 made sense because ext4 has full read/write support for ext3 filesystems. ext only lasted a year before ext2 superseded it so it hardly counts. Anyway with a partition size limitation of 2 GB very few people would be using it now even if it still existed.

Forcing Apple to allow third-party app stores isn't enough

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

I went the other way. I got tired of wading through all the crapware in the Google Play Store, and the almost complete lack of OS updates.

Re: I don't need to Apple to turn into the Playstore.

I find it's a wash because my Apple phones last longer than my Android phones did. Partly this is the result of repair services being available for Apple phones that aren't really for most Android phones. The fact that Apple actually bothers to put out OS updates for their phones helps too.

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

And nearly all desktop web browsers are functionally clones of Chromium, even though they don't have to be.

Scripted shortcut caused double-click disaster of sysadmin's own making

I performed more than one recovery from similar situations based on two bits of knowledge:

- Unlike DOS FDISK, Linux fdisk doesn't overwrite any data in the partition itself, so if you know the partition sizes you can use it to re-create a missing MBR

- FAT32 stores a spare copy of the boot sector in sector 6.

Fix the partition table, then use DEBUG (or a sector editor, if you've got one handy) to copy sector 6 to sector 0, and you've resurrected the filesystem.

Elon Musk's ambitions for Starship soar high while reality waits on launchpad

A lot of the N1's problems were quality control related. One launch failed because someone left a bolt inside a propellant tank and a turbopump ingested it and grenaded, for example. They weren't even testing every engine before flight, something I believe SpaceX is doing. However, the two spacecraft do have a rushed development process in common.

CISA barred from coordinating with social media sites to police misinformation

Re: I never thought leopards would eat MY face...

The government, at least in the US, has no legal power to remove content. They can ask, which is what they did, but as the existence of many right-wing social media networks demonstrates there would have been no consequences for refusal other than being asked again.

Re: I never thought leopards would eat MY face...

I think this is an odd take because disseminating information is what a lot of government agencies DO. What's next, software companies suing to stop CISA from distributing CVEs, because the government shouldn't be telling us whether software is insecure?

5G satellite briefly becomes brightest object in night sky

Re: Sic transit gloria astra...

By a couple hours after dusk, everything in low orbit that's above your local horizon will be in shadow.

Re: Sic transit gloria astra...

For casual stargazing it's not that big a deal. None of this stuff is internally lit, and the satellites that are visible to the naked eye are in low orbit, so you just have to wait until it's all in the Earth's shadow. That takes a couple hours but it takes that long for the sky to get properly dark and your eyes to adjust anyway.

The real hazard here is that a lot of near-earth asteroids can ONLY be imaged just after dusk or just before dawn, so our ability to see an object that might smack us back into the stone age is getting worse over time.

Human knocks down woman in hit-and-run. Then driverless Cruise car parks on top of her

Re: Once again. . .

The AV still shouldn't have moved while there was someone in the crosswalk.

Red Hat bins Bugzilla for RHEL issue tracking, jumps on Jira

Re: Economies of Scale

I meant more that, for example, filtering spam becomes easier when you have an extremely large corpus to train it on and can spread the effort of managing it across millions of accounts instead of dozens.

Re: Shame

In recent years most of RedHat's bugzilla has been locked down to customers only, anyway.

Re: Even Microsoft dogfoods things

Email benefits so much from economies of scale that it just doesn't make much sense for most companies to run their own servers, anymore. I stopped when it became clear that tending spam filters had become a full-time job in its own right.

Equal Employment Commission sues Tesla for racist discrimination, retaliation at Fremont plant

Re: Just look at Twitter

He's ultimately what you'd expect the product of an apartheid state to be.

Yelp sues Texas for right to publish actual accurate abortion info

Re: Pure performative politics

Blue Texas is like cold fusion, a fable that I keep being assured is just around the corner. I'll believe it when I see it. I'm pretty sure the establishment there would burn the state down before they'd let it go blue.