Re: So much MS BS spin. Privacy? or minute by minute monitoring of a Windows 11 system?
> Settings experience
OMG, please, please tell me they dont call it that!
1000 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Apr 2017
I have XP SP3 installed on a much more modern Dell machine with a Xeon 3.something GHz 4 core CPU and 16BiB of RAM simply so I can use a DDS3 tape drive to read DDS1/2/3 tapes at work.
A Windows 2022 server with backupexec 22 installed was not able to do it as the windows driver for DDS drives seems to not support anything below DAT72 drives, which is really annoying as there is no real reason why it shouldnt work as they are just SCSI tape drives at the end of the day and the generic driver supplied by microsoft is called dat4mm.
So XP was chosen as it is the latest version of Windows that still has a fully functional NTBackup which along with backupexec can read these tapes (Backupexec uses NTBackup format). The main WIn 2022 server handles LTO and tapes the DAT72 dive can read.
This Dell has 1 PCI slot but is mostly PCIe. NO big deal for XP, it was perfectly happy as long as I set the UEFI to enable CSM and I had to use SP3 as an SP2 install disc would blue screen after installation. SP3 is lightning fast on it and with a driver from Nvidia for the Quadro card I put in I get a decent resolution for the 22" Dell display port monitor.
Several devices were obviously not recognised, HD Audio being one, but I dont need that. USB3 support too, but the motherboard has USB 2 ports as well so thats how I transfer the recovered data off.
The problem with the holographic discs were the lasers. As compenets they had to be tiny and were simply not really useful.
This new disc uses 4 lasers for different stages of reading and writing and as comp[onents they are more usable.
What they did here was find a way a BIG laser diode can make marks way smaller than its wavelength. None of the holographic systems could do that.
> And Blu-ray failed to make the same splash exactly because at that point, many people had an Internet connection that was good enough to just stream whatever they were interested in.
The actual reason more like this:
1. VHS made home video popular, not DVD.
2. SVHS failed because people already had VHS and didn’t care enough to have a new machine and tapes just for a better picture
3. DVD came about and now the public were ready for a picture upgrade, also eventually getting DVD recording too. The old tapes were old by now, SVHS just was too new with not enough benefit. DVD went into a market ready for such an upgrade.
4. Bluray came out, like SVHS it has struggled because even with people having HD TV's most people don’t care about HD enough to stop buying DVD or swear they can’t tell the difference, still! It is well known that DVD sells better than bluray, thus many shows and movies ONLY get a DVD release as it’s cheaper to make and buy and makes loads of sales. If it were just "the age of streaming" that caused blueray to have less sales, why are people still buying loads of DVDs?
It’s all in the numbers. The films and TV shows getting physical releases don’t just sit on the shelves and evaporate, they have to sell otherwise they wouldn’t be produced in the first place. I mean FGS, Audio CD is still everywhere and all bands, at least the ones I listen to, release new albums on Audio CD and even Vinyl too. Super Audio CD? DVD Audio? Didn’t grab the market, no longer made besides some SA CD's for classical markets. DVD Audio fizzled out and was simply replaced with Video DVD that had the audio and video (such as a concert) on it! Same quality, more standard.
Audio CD, still made and sells. DVD Video, still made and sells. Bluray still made and sells well enough. UHD bluray still fairly new and does sell to enthusiasts and those who care enough about 4K TV's to actually want to view 4K on them.
As for streaming, well, that has been getting some bad rap as of late with hikes in subscription costs and the inclusion of adverts. People went to streaming NOT to escape DVD, but to escape ADVERTS. WE ALL WENT TO NETFLIX TO AVOID ADVERTS. Plus, we were told that EVERYTHING would be on streaming, yet a decade or so later, and we have adverts and FAR FROM EVERYTHING, with things vanishing randomly, even when you were told you OWNED IT FOREVER.
So, streaming is now starting to lose out to DVD and bluray again. Even Disney has released SW expanded universe stuff on DVD and bluray to try and capture new subscribers to Disney+.
Not everyone is a sheep mate, we can’t all be herded and follow the herd to the next fashionable thing. Many who do, get bored of it and wander off back to where they started or somewhere near it (people still buy books printed on dead trees would you believe!). Some like me watch the herd and follow after they finish making a mess of things, or I stay put. And people like me have MONEY to spend. Thats why Audio CD etc still havnt died, and why vinyl popped back.
> Where it has to compete with tape.
Not hard to do, the only way tape wins over optical today is capacity. Thats it. Remove that, giving the discs as much or more capacity as a tape and it wipes the floor with tapes due to its random access nature.
Not even LTFS would stand a chance.
Tape, with its shell will however have better durability, but with hard coatings even a disc is nearly impossible to sctarch and the disc takes up less tom than the tapes.
Also, one major selling point over tape is the disc is random access.
Tape isnt, even if you use LTFS you still need to wind the tape back and forth.
When CD came out there was also DAT and DCC, tape formats that had the same audio quality (or close) as CD and that could also seek to find a track. Thing is the CD went to the selected track immediatly, while the tapes took a few seconds to wind to it.
> Erase hundreds of terabytes with one simple scratch!
If you are able to make a scratch. BD-R are nearly impossible to scratch without intentionally trying to do it!
But a HDD is easy to kill just by accidentally dropping it. An optical disc would just need to be wiped clean after picking up some dust from the floor.
> where did they top-out? Around the 2.6Gb mark for double-sided platters IIRC
Where have you been? Try 33 GB per layer.
besides, its not about how fast you spin the disc, christ a CD can spin faster than you can blink, but the data density that affects the speeds. As this media is very dense youll just spin it like a 1x CD and get a throughput that will saturate any IO connection we have today.
> By the time it arrives, flash storage will be cheaper per TB, orders of magnitude faster, smaller, longer lasting, and physically more robust.
And pigs will have learnt to fly drones.
> longer lasting
I cant belive that for a second, nobody is loking at archival flash. They all claim up to 10 years simply because they have no clue. ALl they know for sure is if you write to it only ONCE, that data will stay put for a very long time. But the more you use the device, the weaker it gets, to the point that it may hold data only for a few weeks!
If they were looking at actually defining the longevity of flash, I'll take that statement more seriously. Otherwise it;s all just a coin toss and by the time we get these optical discs we will still be tossing the coins.
> cheaper per TB
Thats the big con with flash. It never actually gets cheaper, just bigger. I want 4GB SD cards for 30p dammit!! A DVD+R is waaaaay cheaper than flash.
> smaller
Christ I hope not! microSD is small enough thanks!
> physically more robust
Even a CF card will survive being driven over, I dont think there is much more room for imporovemnt here.
Wow, I have never ever seen any optical disc rot at all.
You must live on Venus. Or, you have shoddy discs.
I find apart from the known isue with old 90's CD's pressed in the UK by PDO, the only case of further damage seems to be in the US. Something about your harsh environments (perhaps the air conditioning) or they were made in the US by substandard factories (princo discs, you''l be better off with paper!).
The only thing that was odd recently was I opened up a commercial DVD that I hadnt opened in about 10 years. The disc was, misty. Like it had permanant condensation on it. I was like, "OMG I finally have found a case of degredation", only I noticed that whatever it was casta shadow on the reflective layer. It was on teh surface and, my finger smudged it. Something oily on the disc! So I simply gave it a light wash in the sink, just a damp soapy bit of tissue and it was clean as a whistle.
Then I looked at the inside of the case, it was in there too. I wiped that away with some IPA this time. Then I found out that some case plastics outgas and leave oily residue on themselves and the discs. Turns out the deposit on the disc is harmless, but unless cleaned off will caurse read issues. That mate is the only time Ive seen anything that gave me cause for concern about optical media and it turned out to merely be an annoyance in the end.
For comparison, my discs, pressed ones are in a typically heated UK livingroom which obviously has no AC. The burned media are in cases, spinles and the oldests are in a few binders which use plastic sleeves. These are kept out of sunlight and are zipped up for months on end.
ONly 2 discs showed issues when doing an error scan, Tesco branded DVD+R DL discs. The errors had not even got close to being uncorrectable but are above my threshold for concern, thus they were burned to new discs. The errors were at the edge, at the layer transition. My Verbatim DVD+R DL and BD-R DL also show an uptick in error rates at the edges but it's hardly anything to worry about.
I totaly agree.
What drives me mad is that with all this wasteful multi-core GHz and fast insecure connectivity methods like thunderbolt (oh, it becomes secure if you run additional software, which you can just disable) is the fact that the primary use of this power is to hide the lazyness and inefficient coding, non-existent testing and downright terrible design choices of people who only muck this stuff up because it is cool to look "new".
Take systemd for example, totally bonkers design made by a laptop user and foisted upon everyone by default even on a server. Unpredictable, non-repoducible boots and shutdowns. My home PC boots in unpredictable amounts of time because of it and it may take several mins or less than a second to shut down just because systemd is systemd.
My 486 was bloody faster :D
> A nice responsive user interface benefits lots of users - and thankfulky the threshold of clicking an icon and getting a near instantaneous response have been passed some time ago for most of us.
Anyone not running windows, yes.
The number of times I've seen windows explorer get into an unresponsive state, then gets killed by some watchdog, only to be responsive for a few seconds then enterst the unresponsive state again and the cycle repeats.
The usual fixes?
sfc /scannow?
DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth?
Nope...
CAD worked just find 20 years ago on systems that had only just busted through the 1GHz barrier.
Much of your software is so bloated and inefficient you have to have multiple cores just to conteract it.
Only a few algorithms actually benefit from faster CPU's such as raytracing, for that your really should be using a GPU anyway. CAD is only needing it because of two reasons, acutal new processes or requirements or bloat, UI bloat, unoptimised code.
If CPU's are so fast why does it take 10 mins to log into windows 10? What is it doing? Nothing useful, trust me I've looked into it.
Slowing down the password hash functions to confirm a correct password is standard security practce to make brute forcing attacks expensive.
iPhones take it further making you wait hours or days before getting another chance to try a PIN.
That is established practice, not matter how good your passwords are, a system that doesnt add delays into the password hash functions etc means the difference between trying 1000 passwords a second and 100,000,000
> 3.5" floppy discs are not analogue.
YES they are.
They use frequency modulation and as far as I know a sine wave is not digital.
The C64 datasette (cassette drive) was as close to a digital tape you can get, but it still recorded parts of an analogue waveform into an analogue medium, that of magnetic particles.
It is not possible to move from a 1 to a 0 in zero time, thus it is not digital (the media). It is not possible to record a 1 and a 0 on an analogue medium as it can store any intermediate value, thus th logic 1 you stored earlier may have a absolute value of 500mV (when read by the head) and a logic 0 following it may be at -500mV, but then the media has a bad spot and only alowed a logic one coming after your perfect ones earlier to be at 450mV and the following logic 0 end up being -372mV. On a DIGITAL medium, you will never have that problem.
Digital media must only store discrete digital values. Not even todays flash media can do that, as again, flash media is ANALOGUE. The universe is not digital, such ways of looking at it are artificial. We thus read back our analogue media DIGITALLY by deciding the RANGE at which we have a logic 1 or a 0.
The C64 recorded fast electromagnetic pulses to the tape, but due to the nature of the uiniverse, thost pulses, that square wave, became an analogue waveform. Thus the C64 datasette has a circuite to read that analogue waveform off the analogue medium and "square it up" into the pulse train.
Floppy discs are analogue, as are HDD's and SSD's. We read and write to them in various ways, storing and retreiving analoge values and waveforms, which we then process into a digital bytestream. When a floppy disc drive has pre-amplifiers involved in reading and writing, well, there you go, floppies are analogue.
Optical media however can do that, the marks made on optical media are either there or not there. We dont care if they are deep or shallow as long as they are there or not there. The data is actually not encoded in the marks themselves but in the changes between them.
> Maybe it's time to think again about Blu-ray?
Maybe they are looking to make their own version of ODA?
You have to archive to something, either LTO tape, ODA or Bluray. There is nothing else at this time.
RDX doesn't count it's a HDD buffed up to survive a drop.
Also, in a modern IT environment you have to have read only options. Not all secure data is allowed on re-writable media where I work. Plenty of customers are still asking for 50GB or more of data burned onto DVD single layer, simply because it's R/O.
I'm trying to let them know that dual layer exists and if they invest on a USB bluray drive we can send them one disc instead.
> Did you ever try to repair a computer with a messed up SSD or hard drive, plus UEFI and BitLocker?
YES oh god dont remind me!
I had a machine that was not bitlockered but HAD been using Intel fake raid, which all got messed up with macrium reflect images not supporting Intel fake raid and the users also messing up the machine thus requiring me to restore an untested image to the machine rather than having them sort out the driver issues they created.
Ended up with a totally borked UEFI and windows boot config. Took me most of a day to sort out as windows recovery environment as usual was totally inept and useless, guides on the web on how to regenerate the windows boot config on the "newly and manually created in Linux EFI partition" all didnt work as they only worked for specific versions of windows.
It was a bloody mess of browser tabs and lost of reading and failures. I was very nostalgic about the good old MBR days, with a boot loaded installed in the first sector of a drive or partition.
My home systesm still use that.
On paper UEFI looks great, but thats on paper. The paper is not what was implemented by far.
> If an attacker can get a file into the EFI partition then you've got more problems than dodgy image processing by UEFI.
Thats totally trivial. It's a R/W FAT32 partition. If you are lucky something software based in the OS may try to monitor or write protect it but a user merely has to run something as admin to let code modify anything anywhere on a HDD.
It's one of the reasons why I'm against UEFI, it should ALL be in ROM. We have big ROMs these days, why is an unreliable partition needed?
> using it as your main OS not readily viable (unless you remote into a doze or Linux box and use that for web based activities
I've started reducing my "web centric" lifestyle to something more like what I grew up with in the 90's. I'm fed up of the "hyper-web brain fudge" I have during my free time where every action or query I get/do seems to involve me jumping onto the net and getting distracted, not to mention the fact that when I do put the net down it constantly reaches out to me with notifications. I used to use dialup when I was a kid, or browse at school. There were clearly defined boundaries of online and offline.
Thus I have "offline time" on saturday mornings where anything that uses TCP/IP is left where it sits and I spend the morning watching good old live TV or something off a DVD, while reading a paper magazine during ad breaks. I'm quite enjoying catching episodes of Lovejoy or Minder.
But I also have started putting together machines running internet incapable OS's such as DOS/Win 3.1 partly to much about with old games and software but also to be a distraction free environment for doing "offline computing" as I call it. I have need for a win98 machine also for other software, particularly to run old CDROM/DVD encyclopaedias. I'm trying to retrain myself to check my encyclopaedias and other books for information, before using the web. If I'm going to keep buying "these books" then I suppose I better use them dammit, but like everyone else I'm trained like a monkey to pull out the phone or tablet and google or go direct to Wikipedia and ignore its citations (or lack of) as well as not checking what it said about the subject yesterday (does anyone actually think to check that the article hasn’t been vandalised I wonder).
I have a ton of offline only machines ranging from C64's and Acorn Electrons to the aforementioned Win98 box. I want to go back to using the web *when it is actually needed* and as a resource, not a lifestyle choice.
So Plan9 not having a browser that handles Web 2.0 or whatever it’s called these days is no big deal really. I might have fun learning to write a Gopher client instead.
As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's my parents house had storage heating and it was controlled by a time-switch.
Smart meters handle economy 7 and 10 just fine. They are SMART meters, they just need to support multiple rates.
Nobody uses the "radio signal", unless its a very old system. They use a time switch or the smart meter. All the meter does is log how much leccy is used overnight separately to the daytime use. Thats it. Two readings. Smart meters thus support storage heaters that switch on due to a timer, anything that draws power overnight is counted as the reduced rate.
ITS HOW PEOPLE CHARGE EV's AT HOME TOO!!!
> need a coat of sealant
Which would require planning permission, signing off and several £000's of bills.
That's why nobody bothers. Even if you get a grant to install insulation it's going to cost you time and money, in a cost of living crisis and with todays time poor society most dont have the time to sit at home for a few days while someone installs the stuff.
They may be able to work from home, but instead of the cat jumping in front of the webcam you now have the builders bum in the background :D
DIY? Well maybe, but these days you are soon to be legally unable to change a light bulb without getting it signed off or installed by a sparky. It wont be long before putting a ladder up into the attic to install new insulation will also be something that only naughty people do as, you havnt been trained to use a ladder, and dont have the PPE.
> wishful thinking
Yep, it will never happen, well not in our lifetimes.
Even if they manage to fuse stuff, Thunderfoot on youtube debunked the whole fusion thing when he pointed out a big flaw that once I realised I had missed it I was convinced fusion couldn't happen.
The problem is the engineering of the plant itself. Once we manage fusion, well you have to actually design a reactor that can make it work. What nobody bothers thinking about is all the fusion waste.
Fusion waste?
Yes, those particles don't disappear into another dimension in the reactor, no they fuse together into harmless and useless junk crap. You have to devise a way to clean them all out of the reactor because when they get created they will stop further fusion.
So the process would be:
1. Fill the reactor with fuel
2. Fuse it and draw off the energy. Fusion now becomes impossible due to interfering waste.
3. Clean out all the superheated waste.
4. Re-establish the conditions for fusion again.
5. GOTO 1
Everyone is still working on getting 2 working and nobody has any answers for steps 3 and 4. It will be a very long time before anyone builds anything but a demo plant.
As a kid I grew up on a house that had storage heaters.
I remember the mornings being warm, the afternoon being "meh" and the evenings being cold.
At the time I was used to it, I was also used to wiping up the huge amounts of condensation on the windows every morning. Double glazing did reduce that a little.
Then I moved to my own house, which had central heating. First time I ever saw anything like that! Then the parents installed a CH system replacing the storage heaters.
So, 10 years after moving in and having a new boiler installed some wacky gov plan to replace the whole lot for heat pumps takes the biscuit. In a country that has no tradition of even installing AC, installing heat pumps is a very expensive and specialist operation. In the US you can practically DIY your own install using cheap second hand gear of cheap new gear aimed at an already saturated and competitive market. All a HP is is a reversible AC unit after all.
Apart from not being able to afford the luxury price of a HP install (which would set me back £15,000 and have the house ripped and stripped apart to install the pipework etc), it also turns out I, like many terraced houses, simply cant have one fitted!
Rules on distance between the pump and next door restrict my option to not having one installed. Too close to next door, thus too noisy. And yes they make a racket, one house across the road from me has one and even though there is a whole road width between me and it, I can hear it running. Just imagine all houses having one, the additive noise would be new and greatly noticeable.
So I cant afford one. I cant have one installed legally, maybe that will change and the g'ment will tell everyone to clam up and put up with the noise.
Options...
Storage heaters again. And of course, a return to wearing seasonally appropriate clothing indoors, no more t-shirts indoors in January. Wollen jumpers, like the good old days!
But I'm running the boiler till they switch off the gas.
> He was the figurehead of the free aspect, but open source was coming anyway
No it wasn’t. If you read up on the history RMS was basically the LAST person left in the Free Software community who wasn’t a total sell out making big bucks.
The culture existed for decades before it was named Free Software, which RMS did as it finally needed a name to make people realise that it had existed.
Open Source only came about because of the pushing of Free Software ideas into unixy places as GNU was being built. This attracted new faces and invigorated old ones, now all nostalgic about the old days of hacking. But they had much business acumen and were much less strict about hypocrisy than Stallman, so they happily created Open Source as their own rebranding. They wanted the Free Software feeling, without the politics but with all the popularity as well as a massive chance to have a dig at Microsoft.
> I don't see any reason why Linux would not have succeeded with a BSD-style licence, for example.
Again, you have no clue what the history is. You think linux would work in a BSD world? Well, where is the rest of the OS? Linux only worked because GNU wanted a kernel. No GNU, no Linux. Torvalds would have still wanted to improve Minix so Linux would still have gotten going but without GNU to be the OS around it Linux today would essentially be like Haiku, an interesting development OS that is coming along bit by bit.
BSD licenses are way more annoying that the GPL. The GPL is the dominant license for a reason. BSD licenses are just a way to allow people to be nice to people who want to be dicks to others further down the line.
Even today the BSD's are the odd ones out, just about known about and used. Why would FreeBSD do any better with Linux? It already had a brilliant kernel, yet has largely stated where it always has been.
Without Stallman, GNU, FSF and the GPL there would be no Linux as you know it. BSD's will be odd OS's you find in scientific circles and universities. There would be no ODF, no Tivo (remeber that one?) no software defined radio, no Raspberry Pi. All there would be is Microsoft and proprietary software and formats.
Imagine where you were back in the 90's with computers. What software were you using? What were you upgrading to? Now imagine you never got that free Redhad CDROM in your Gateway PC box...