Posts by vtcodger

What’s that in CES heaven, is it a star? Or is it that damned elusive flying car?

Terrafugia

These folks actually might be close to a real flying car. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia They flew a prototype a decade ago with a real human in the cockpit (Is it still a cockpit if it's a car?). It'll be expensive -- roughly $300,000. And about the same payload as a Mazda Miata -- 2 normal humans and a small suitcase. And the driver needs a pilot's license. And despite a lot of promises, they have yet to actually ship even one vehicle. But they seem to have addressed most of the problems of meeting both aircraft and ground vehicle safety standards in a single "car" capable of flight.

One wonders who will write insurance policies for these things and what insurance will cost.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: An elephant in the room

You folks can find a lot of information -- much of which is certainly correct -- on US nuclear security procedures and interlocks at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissive_Action_Link. Might want to read it.

Boeing will cough up $2.5bn+ to settle US fraud charge over 737 Max safety

Re: Other countries

China's motives in grounding the 737MAX, while appropriate, may not have been entirely altruistic. The prototypes of China's competitive offering, the Comac C919, are completing flight tests. The first deliveries may well take place in 2021. On the other hand, the C919 hasn't killed anyone ... so far.

Watt's next for batteries? It'll be more of the same, not longer life, because physics and chemistry are hard

Re: Gurgling Cheese!

It's not that bad an article, but it seems to have been written by a competent journalist after a quick cram course on batteries. Nothing wrong with that. But the results do seem a bit suboptimal.

Batteries are complicated. They are going to have to improve a lot in order to support the climate warrior's vision of a non-carbon based future. They need much greater energy density, and faster recharge and more full recharge cycles and better low temperature performance and limited charge leakage in when not in use. All without sacrificing efficiency and without any propensity to release their large energy storage destructively. And they need to be CHEAP.

The good news is that there appear to be literally trillions of possible battery chemistries. And dozens of construction parameters for each that can be varied to improve performance. Of course most of those possibilities will utterly impractical. But nonetheless it seems that slow improvement will likely continue for a very long time.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Re: "They should have a law against old dying dinosaurs buying up innovative companies"

"...vowed to keep its new unit independent...".

Well ... possibly true for some definitions of independent

Dell Wyse Thin Client scores two perfect 10 security flaws

Re: FTP?

"Could you offer some examples of when it would be used properly these days?"

I don't know about anybody else, but I use it to maintain my website. It is simple. It moves files. It is scriptable. It needs a userID and password for access. What alternative would you propose that doesn't do pretty much the same thing -- probably in a more complicated way -- with pretty much the same vulnerabilities?

It took me many decades, but I eventually learned by trial and error that overly simplistic "solutions" don't work because they are flawed and overly complex "solutions" don't work (for me) because I am flawed. FTP seems a reasonable compromise (for me).

Well, on the bright side, the SolarWinds Sunburst attack will spur the cybersecurity field to evolve all over again

Re: What about SIEM / Threat-detection / Traffic-profiling tools?

I'm surprised that unusual traffic was not detected to C&C servers?"

Surprised? Why? The folks behind this are clearly quite clever. Quite likely they minimized traffic to C&C servers, spread it out over time, and disguised it as well. Remember that they are attacking typical business operations where simple purchasing of supplies may involve the folks who need the supplies accessing two dozen sites scattered over the planet just to put a purchase order together. And management and Purchasing might access another, mostly different, sites while processing the PO into final form. And so it goes across maybe two dozen internal organizations -- each with different functions, processes and needs. A typical operation probably legitimately accesses thousands of web sites, email providers, etc on any given day.

And one would expect that when the bad guys find a file of interest -- Final_Plans_For_Gold_Transmutation_Machine.doc perhaps -- they bundle it into a file called something like Company_Logo.JPG and attach it to a routine looking business email sent to Butter_Wouldn't_Melt [e-mail]

I doubt any of that would trigger alarms in even the most paranoid of operations.

Some fundamental rethinking needs to be done here.

So it would seem.

Evolution?

There's a little superficially clamlike animal called a linguloid brachiopod that has been around for about 540,000,000 years. Since the early Cambrian. As far as paleontologists can tell, it hasn't changed much if at all in all those years. Presumably it hasn't needed to.

Since the appearance of the first Lingula, many other critters have evolved. Most of them are long since gone.

Maybe there is something to be said for doing things well up front rather than evolving.

US nuke agency hacked by suspected Russian SolarWinds spies, Microsoft also gets backdoored

Re: Too big to fail

"do you think they would admit it, or try to cover it up?"

Do *I* think they would admit it or cover it up? Neither. I think that given the complexity of their systems, the lack of external (and probably internal) documentation, and the apparent sorry state of their QA, they probably wouldn't know about a Windows Update compromise until somebody external found out about it, published their results and the Register called Microsoft asking for comments.

Dodgy procedures doomed Arianespace's Vega before it even left the launchpad

Re: Are they really saying there were no design issues?

"Wouldn't the use of keyed connectors and/or better testing have caught this?"

Keyed connectors -- Maybe. I was once tangentially involved in an incident investigation of a missile that crashed a few hundred meters downrange during a routine test while tumbling rapidly end over end. The cause was determined to be a manufacturing defect. As it was explained to me, there were steering vanes in the rocket exhaust that were driven by a motor. The motor had tabs to which the control wires were connected. In this case, backwards. Using tabs of incompatible sizes would (probably) prevent that. But if your Mil-Std qualified motor comes as a lot of (most?) motors do with identical connectors for both wires, you're sort of stuck with it.

Better testing? For sure. At least in that case. The test for the wired motor was that powering it moved the steering vane. Nothing about which direction. The test spec was changed forthwith.

Windows on Wheels is back, though the truck has come to a standstill, much like the OS

Re: Not unusual for this company

They never got serviced as the costs was not factored in by them, every single thing was done as cheaply as possible.

So -- run by folks with real, actual, MBA degrees practicing what they learned in school?

What Problem?

What's the problem? Just follow instructions. Contact your Sysadmin. In a few hours (or days or months or years) the situation will be set right.

Or not.

New study: DNS spoofing doubles in six years ... albeit from the point of naff all

Really?

I hope I'm misreading the article. What I think I read is that 1.7% of DNS queries are spoofed and that's a small number. So, no current concern. But why would one hijack a DNS query unless one had malign intent? Are they really saying that nearly one in 50 of my DNS queries will route me to some nasty site and I don't need to worry my pretty little head about that unless/until the situation gets worse?

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Re: Why 5G ?

My impression is that 5G is only actually needed where there are huge crowds of people trying to use phones simultaneously. Say Shinjuku-eki at rush hour or any large stadium while waiting for the event to start. But I have NOT run the numbers and perhaps I've been misled or have misled myself.

Not that I care much. I have a smart phone. It was on sale. Really cheap. Nice hardware. But the software (Android) is so annoying and the UI so awkward that I've never activated service. For my very occasional remote phone needs -- phone calls and the odd text message -- I use an ancient 2G Nokia.

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Re: The problems:

"Perhaps there is a need to reinvent inked ribbon impact printers"

The internet assures me that Okidata still makes and sells ribbon using dot matrix printers. You need something like those or typewriters if you still use multipart forms for some reason or other.

Re: The problems:

"If you don't print often, don't get inkjet."

Or simply print a test page every three weeks or so. That seems to be sufficient to keep the jets unclogged. At least it works for me ... so far.

Re: The problems:

The HP-II and HP-III printers of the 1980s or so that were virtually indestructible and easily repaired if they did break were actually built around Canon print engines.

Google Nest server outage leaves US, European smart homes acting dumb

There are Some Use Cases

There would seem to be some valid use cases for many IOT type devices. Remote viewing of security cameras, adjusting thermostats in areas that are intermittently occupied, limiting access to people who have legitimate current access needs etc, etc, etc. But in many situations, it is unlikely that there will be enough users to justify mass production. So it's likely that much of this connected trash will be designed in ways that maximize profits rather than actual user needs like security, reliabilty and such. Cheap, but annoying and maybe even dangerous. In a lot of cases, I suspect users will be better off sticking to old fashioned manual devices.

China compromised F-35 subcontractor and forced expensive software system rewrite, academic tells MPs

Re: Now I read

"The first Gen 6 successors to the F35 may be in the air by the 2030s"

Perhaps. I'm thinking that unmanned aircraft are getting more capable by the year. Their maneuverability should not be limited by the stresses on a human pilot. They don't need Oxygen systems. Or ejection seats. Or lots of other things that are there to accommodate the human payload. I imagine that they can be as effective as manned aircraft and considerably cheaper than manned aircraft with similar capability. Enough so that suicide tactics are cost effective. Sacrificing a $35M unmanned aircraft to take out a $70M fighter is probably a victory of sorts.

I'm guessing that the F35 may be about the last generation of manned fighter aircraft. Not that the F-35, F-22, Su-57 and J-20 won't still be around -- maintained and flown for many decades. Just that their manned "replacements" may never get beyond the prototype and single digit serial number stage.

I believe some of it.

Do I believe the Chinese might compromise a software contractor? Why yes, of course I do. The Chinese are pretty good at a lot of stuff and I don't see any reason to believe they'd somehow not be good at spying.

Do I believe that the US might find out about it? Sure, that's possible I suppose.

Do I believe that the US government in the normal course of events would admit that the software was compromised? Of course not. Admit vulnerability and error? Does any bureaucracy do that unless the problem is clear to everyone in the universe? Ever?

Do I believe that security is slack at some low level US defense contractors? No, actually I don't. I worked in the US military weapons world for three decades. That was a while ago, but I never, ever saw an operation that didn't take security pretty seriously or whose security wasn't monitored by the government. That doesn't mean that the security was perfect. That would be impossible. But that part of the story doesn't ring true.

The software sucked and needed to be rewritten? I'd say that's pretty normal for complex systems.

Test tube babies: Virgin Hyperloop pops pair of staffers in a pod, shoots them along 500m vacuum tunnel

Re: Imagine all the money ...

" Imagine all the money ... that was sunk went into the hyperloop being invested into research on how to efficiently store energy."

I think that if you look into it, you will find that vast sums are being invested in energy storage research by the US, the EU,China and others-- vastly more than on hyperloop. There's money to be made there and lots of people trying to get a cut of the pie. It's a tough problem -- or rather, a tough complex of problems. I don't think lack of funding is what is limiting the rate of progress in solving those problems.

Re: Logistical Challenges

I agree mostly. The speed advantage of hyperloop over best high speed rail would seem to matter only over really long distances -- Los Angeles to Chicago. And its doubtful there is enough long distance travel anywhere on the planet for the economics of hyperloop to work. Note that the US and Canada where high speed rail might seem reasonable have about 50 km total of not especially fast HSR. If HSR doesn't work in economically North America, how is hyperloop which surely costs more going to succeed?

The problem isn't technology (probably). It's economics.

Re: Logistical Challenges

I have a lot of doubts about how many real use cases there are that will justify the great expense of a system like this. But in current rail transit systems multiple cars follow each other at zero distance. And yes, if there is a catastrophic failure in in one car, the cars following it are prone to suffer serious damage and possibly fatalities and/or major injuries as well. Doesn't seem to bother users much.

I suppose that objectively hyperloop is no more complex than air travel. But air travel scales fairly smoothly to small and infrequent payloads. For example moving people and goods around the Arctic. Hyperloop can't do that today. And not any time soon?

Heck yeah, we should have access to our own cars' repair data: Voters in US state approve a landmark right-to-repair ballot measure

Re: Cars collect some interesting data...

"... differing RPMs ..."

Really? Evidence that I've been seriously misled about how internal combustion engines work? It's hard to see how the revolution counts could differ by more than one or at most two (due to quantization error). Either we're witnessing quantum mechanical affects at a macro scale or the engine firmware is a bit off. DevOps strikes again?

And what are they counting? It's not like piston-crankshaft synchronization are optional in an engine that is not in the terminal stages of self destruction.

Maybe they are counting ignition pulses to each cylinder? That'd be feasible I suppose and perhaps meaningful in engines that do cylinder deactivation?

Google's plan to make User-Agent string even less useful breaks our device detection tech, says NetMarketShare

Prior Art

Genesis -- Chapter 11

[11:1] Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

[11:2] And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

[11:3] And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

[11:4] Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth."

[11:5] The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.

[11:6] And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

[11:7] Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech."

[11:8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

[11:9] Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Is it possible that the answer to the problem of great complexity is not greater complexity?

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

Counting problems

"Fifty-two different states ..."

Trump's election strategy revealed. He's going to create two new states by executive order. Each with 300 electoral votes.

No need for more asteroid-blasting attempts, NASA's OSIRIS-REx has more than enough space dirt

Re: Isolation

Sadly, Budweiser is not an effective sterilizing agent. Does it cause Stupidity? Probably Yes. Sterility, No.

Return of the flying car, just when we all need to escape

Thanks

Thank you Mr Dabbs. For years, I've been led to believe that massive misrepresentation of broadband speeds is a phenomenon unique to the US. The official statistics were described by FCC commissioner Michael Copps as "Stunningly meaningless" in 2008 and I can't see that things have changed much in the years since. Now I see that it's not just us. Maybe it's everyone. I'm not sure why that makes me feel better. But it does.

Brave browser first to nix CNAME deception, the sneaky DNS trick used by marketers to duck privacy controls

Re: Sooner or later we're going to have to work out a way to fund all this.

And while we're at it, ban scripting in ads. That should hopefully largely eliminate the security threat that causes many of us to block advertising.

Big Tech's Section 230 Senate hearing was like Jack Dorsey’s beard: An inexplicable mess that needed a serious trim

Re: Engineers

Xi Jinping was educated as a Chemical Engineer. He also has a doctorate in "law and ideology" whatever the heck that is.

Machine learning gets semi conscious... Waymo, Daimler vow to bring self-driving trucks to American highways

Re: Maximum Overdrive

I think Christine was maybe level 7 since it (she?) included two additional characteristics over an above full autonomy -- self-repair and self-defense. It's unclear whether if treated decently -- regular oil changes and an occasional wash and wax -- she might not have been a perfectly OK family car.

A bit of sanity

"Our Driver-as-a-Service model will first be focused on highway driving and also handle driving on a limited amount of surface streets to depots, whether that's an LTL terminal or warehouse or distribution center." A tiny bit of sanity in a domain dominated by nuttiness of Muskian proportions. Highway driving -- specifically on expressways is a far simpler problem than driving on surface streets. Basically it would seem to amount to match your entry speed to traffic and make sure you have a big enough hole for your vehicle. Once on the expressway, stay in the slow lane. Stay at or below the speed limit. Follow at a safe distance. Pull over if you see flashing lights in back of you. DON'T HIT ANYTHING!!! If you don't understand the situation, pull into the breakdown lane, stop and call for help. There are still a LOT of problems. Toll booths, Construction areas. Weigh stations. Port of Entry checks. livestock on the highway. Really bad weather, etc, etc, etc. But they can likely be handled.

I'm actually impressed with Waymo. The rest of the automobile industry ... not so much.

One of the world's most prominent distributed ledger projects has been pushed back by a year

Re: Scalability not in the specification?

Scalability? No problem. We'll just do a bit of DevOps an add some AI and put the whole thing in the cloud and use blockch ... ehrr ... uh ... scratch that last bit.

Congrats, Meg Whitman, another multi-billion-dollar write-off for the CV: Her web vid upstart Quibi implodes

Re: Meg Whitman drives another company into the ground

"Thank God and Greyhound You're Gone"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcqZkUvcxO0

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: The perfect title

"Everything Trump Touches Dies"

... sigh ... If only we could weaponize Trump and tame his guidance/reliability problems, the US probably wouldn't need a standing army.

Gamers are replacing Bing Maps objects in Microsoft Flight Simulator with rips from Google Earth

Re: Why?

I also was hoping for a Google version of Gibraltar in the article. I don't recall the rock looking quite like that, but it was a LONG time ago when I saw it. And I must say that even if the Microsoft image turns out to have some elements that are pure fantasy, the image seems really quite nice.

Good news: Boffins have finally built room-temperature superconductors. Bad news: You'll need a laser, a diamond anvil, and a lot of pressure

You'll need a laser, diamond anvils, a lot of pressure

... And a sweater. 15C is a bit on the nippy side for most people.

Overall, good news, but the articles I've read are a bit scant on issues like toxicity, stability, flammability, rigidity, etc. Things one might want to look into before incorporating the stuff into a real world device. Assuming it doesn't evaporate or turn into a pile of somewhat noxious debris when the pressure is released.

'20,000-plus staff' could face the chop in spin-off of IBM's IT outsourcing biz, says Wall Street analyst

In the long run

IBM seems to be evolving toward a glorious future where the entire company consists of a CEO, a board of directors, three janitors, a patent portfolio, and the 8000 lawyers required to monetize the patents.

We won't leave you hanging any longer: Tool strips freeze-inducing bugs from Java bytecode while in production

It's the drinking water

These folks think arbitrarily altering code without checking with the code's creators is a nifty idea.

It's clearly the drinking water .. I tell you, it has to be something in their drinking water.

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Oops, sorry

It's clear from the article and comments that many of you think the number 365 has something to do with service availability. Actually, the number is just there because the folks in Accounts Receivable were adamant that their sanity depended on different Office products having clearly distinguishable names.

If you MUST know, 365 is the street address of our regional office in Minot, North Dakota. We're sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Re: Bizarre

It makes some sense to put collaborative work on the internet -- provided the aggravation of preventing/controlling simultaneous update is less than the aggravation of shipping files around manually. Why someone would pay money to put personal files on someone elses' computer subject to all manner of calamities? Beats me.

(OK, OK, backup to the cloud might make some sense for some use cases. But I bought a 16GB flash drive at the grocery store last week for $8 USD. That works too. Ironically, the drive was purchased to sneakernet some large files via snailmail that were proving to be too difficult to move through dropbox.)

Big Tech to face its Ma Bell moment? US House Dems demand break-up of 'monopolists' Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google

Re: Teddy Roosevelt

Prior to the mid-1960's with LBJ (that's president Lyndon B. Johnson), it was the DEMOCRATS who represented the conservatives of America,...

Not dead wrong, But more wrong than right. The Democrats prior to 1966 represented a curious spectrum of interests including labor unions (quite powerful back then), socialists, liberals, many (not all) working class voters and -- in the states of the old confederacy -- social conservatives whose primary interests seemed to be keeping the blacks in their place and punishing business interests for a century of real and imagined grievances. The Republicans back then were a moderate, somewhat right of center, pro-business party. Remember, it was Republican votes in the senate that carried the 1964 Civil Rights bill through.

After the late 1970s social conservatives migrated to the Republican Party -- which seems, if one believes the polls, to be in the process of self-destructing under the "leadership" Donald Trump. The Democrats really haven't changed all that much. It's still a slightly left of center collection of diverse interests except it has lost most of the social conservatives and has formed a probably temporary alliance with moderate conservatives who find the Democrats a bit less loathsome than the crew who have hijacked their Republican party.

Excel Hell: It's not just blame for pandemic pandemonium being spread between the sheets

Re: Alternative?

"Whats the alternative to Excel then?"

OpenOffice/LibreOffice I suppose, but they seem to me more or less Excel look alikes. Koffice, but I don't think it's maintained any more. Emacs org-mode tables, but they are not for the faint of heart. Personally, I was kind of fond of the spreadsheet in Microsoft Works, but I think getting it to run in a modern software environment might be, at the very least, challenging. And converting it's files to any other current format might be even more difficult.

Downvoted because in my experience Excel adds a variety of bizarre idiosyncracies on top of the numerous normal hazards of spreadsheet use. I'm talking about things that didn't/don't happen in better behaved spreadsheets. My favorite -- the teacher who tried to copy and paste a column of zip codes. Excel inserted the first then copied down as expected. But it quietly incremented each code after the first 90210, 90211, 90212 ...

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Re: If Bill Gates has the technology to implant chips to control people's behavior

if you believe 5G causes COVID-19 ...

Utter nonsense!!! It's well known the COVIDF-19 causes 5-G rather than the opposite. It's laid out right there in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Windows to become emulation layer atop Linux kernel, predicts Eric Raymond

Re: ROTFL!

"...and why most open source software is pretty limited, ugly, and not user-friendly."

Gnuplot, image magick, python, r, etc, etc, etc are limited? I think not

I will give you that Windows graphics are stunning and that Windows can be quite easy to use -- when everything goes just exactly right. Sadly, in my experience, that isn't all that often the case.

User friendly? I'll give you that writing bash scripts can be like dealing with a hungry crocodile with a toothache. On the other hand, I don't recall that writing command line scripts for MSDOS/Windows was exactly a transcendent experience. And in my experience Unix tools tend to be far more capable and flexible than their Microsoft equivalents. GUIs? Windows gives you one choice which has devolved from a usable, if mundane, interface in Windows 95 to an incomprehensible jumble in Windows 10. The unix world lets you choose from dozens.

BTW, I'm told that Microsoft has finally gotten around to inventing workspaces -- decades after they have been available in Unix UIs. Really, how have you lived without them?

Re: Am I the only one?

I didn't downvote you. But I disagree. The big gain here I think would be that printers, scanners, and a multitude of other useful peripherals might come with drivers that actually work in Unix. It's all very well to babble about SANE, WINE, native unix drivers. My experience has been that they rarely work very well (if at all) without many hours of effort on my part. And often not then. In my experience, the only things beyond mice, keyboards, and monitors that one can count on working out of the box with linux are storage devices or devices that emulate storage devices.

Also, if I understand ESR's argument -- which I may not -- Microsoft simply won't see much profit in screwing with the Linux kernel. Money in, no money back. Maybe they simply won't bother.

In a world where up is down, it's heartwarming to know Internet Explorer still tops list of web dev pain points

The won't have a choice

"Can we all just agree to stop supporting IE IPv4 come 2021? 2012 If we all do it, they won't have any choice but to switch."

How's that working out for you my_way_or_the_highway folks?

And do keep in mind that most of your users aren't techies. They just want things to work. And even a few of us that are techies think that (many) current trends in "web-design" seem pretty much off-the-rails.

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

OTOH

"The year 2035 will be close to the centenary of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, when a hydrogen-filled airship caught fire after a static spark ignited its onboard gasbags."

OTOH, The Graf Zeppelin made dozens of trans-Atlantic crossings between 1928 and 1937 as well as a round the world trip in 1929. It was a little slow for long distance travel -- max speed 117kph (a bit over 70mph). I imagine a modern version would be substantially faster and hopefully less likely to self-destruct. Likely not what you'd want to fly from London to Melbourne, but for shorter trips like Dublin to Paris or Washington,DC to Boston, it'd likely be a lot faster than a train and not much slower than a jet once airport delays are taken into account. And the economy seats might even be an appropriate size for an adult human being.

Northrop Grumman wins $13.3bn contract with US Air Force to kick off Minuteman III ICBM replacement

Re: Opposite wealth

"Imagine what good all that money could genuinely do for the poor of this world,"

They'd probably just spend it frivolously on food, shelter, and medicine.