* Posts by Bitsminer

640 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017

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American techies in China may be breaking the law by showing up to work

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Citizenship

or they're going to have to give up their US citizenship

Notoriously, China does not recognize dual citizenship.

What might they then become?

Public cloud prices to surge in US and Europe next year

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variable site pricing?

Some places have substantially cheaper electricity than others. Like Quebec vs London.

Will AWS or IBM or Vultr or lesser vendors offer a discount on places with cheaper electrons?

Or perhaps it will be labelled a "fuel/electricity" surcharge if you rent a VM located in Amsterdam over one located in Ohio.

Collapsed Arecibo telescope to be replaced by school

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School district

The budget in 2019 was around $6M per year, according to NSF budget docs.[PDF]

That's less than a small school district. So why close it?

Broadcom to spin VMware takeover as creating 'more competition' in cloud

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competition? who cares?

Will they withdraw the VMware Workstation Player product?

That's all I want to know.

Datacenter fire takes out South Korea's top two web giants

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Uhh, survivorship bias?

You forgot the fourth, fifth and sixth. Those are the former companies that collapsed from lack of plan (#4), an untested plan (#5), or couldn't survive in spite of their plan (#6).

Microsoft HoloLens proves to be a headache for US soldiers

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Re: Just the thought makes me want to vomit

That's a good point -- if you can't ride a bicycle with these gadgets on your head, the MVP ain't. (MVP = minimum viable product).

Contrast the current state of Google Glass. They have had some success in industrial settings for equipment assembly, repair and test. Google Glass

Xiaomi India names Qualcomm as destination for allegedly illegal payments

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Grab...what?

The superapp’s financial arm provides both cash advances and loans. Thirty percent of the company’s gig economy drivers already have one.

The song that came to mind was Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "16 tons"..."I owe my soul to the company store".

Some things never change.

Steganography alert: Backdoor spyware stashed in Microsoft logo

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IoC

The Windows logo always was an "indicator of compromise" for some people. For example, some Linux fanbois.

Some hackers took the hint seriously...

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

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It's official

The issue it fixes is long gone....

Nobody understands it, it does things nobody wants, and it took an accident to find the bug.

Linux is now officially legacy software.

Darth Vader voice actor James Earl Jones allows AI to take over the role

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Negative Function

James Earl Jones' most frightening scene is as the officer cooperating with Major Kong (Slim Pickens) to open the bomb doors in the USAF B-52 advertorial film "Dr Strangelove".

Lieutenant Lothar Zogg : Backup circuits are switched on. Still negative function.

They are both trying so hard to start World War III.

The phrase negative function still resonates.

Rust is eating into our systems, and it's a good thing

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Pronunciation?

Is it rowter, or rooter?

Canadian mind wants to know. I've done both, I must say.

As in "routing the packets here and there, the router is an important element...."

Fitbit users will have to sign into Google from 2023

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HP tried this too

My old-ish inkjet suddenly demanded that I login to the HP website before it would print. The result of some un-asked-for software update I think.

Nope.

After a bit of searching and tinkering (and software deletes and reboots) I discovered there was an "enterprise IT" class of printer driver that did not require login.

Perhaps there is an "enterprise class fitness device" that requires only your own enterprise to log in?

(not really /s)

Letter to FCC: Why are US carriers locking handsets to networks?

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Re: Waiting period...

When you want to add service you get a salesman, when you want to cancel you get an email address.

Upvoted!

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

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Re: Speaking Of Ancient Storage Methods .....

$WORK used to back up the VAXes with 9-track tape. It was the latest 6250 bpi drives from Storagetek, complete with vacuum columns, noisy air pumps, blinken lights, and looked cool as heck. We had about 40 or so RA81 disk drives (454 MB each) to backup.

Until I got the phonecall at 0200AM about the backup failing and what should the machine operator do?

"I dunno. See you in the morning."

Then we switched to LTO-1 in a big Storagetek library. Replaced that with a bigger Sun library; except they promised "expandability" but failed to offer an expansion when we wanted it (it was relabelled from somebody else). Good ole' Sun Microsystems.

We had an "Archiver" package for VAX that we had setup with 9-track tapes. At some point we realized the media had issues (all such 9-track media did). The plastic backing emitted some kind of water-based gunk after a few years. And was thereafter unreadable.

There was a tape "cleaner" -- motorized with a sapphire blade to scrape off the gunk. 200 tapes and two weeks later we were back in business with DLT2000 cartridges.

In the good old days.

In Rust We Trust: Microsoft Azure CTO shuns C and C++

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bad programmers will still be able to write bad code bad Fortran regardless of the language

FTFY.

Internet Society recommends development of Solar-System-scale routing framework

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SCPS, but it doesn't seem to have received much love lately.

Web Page Under Construction

The TCP proxy SCPS-TP is widely used for geosynchronous satellite comms. It is probably insufficient for Mars or Pluto. Or Sedna.

Perhaps the UDP-based QUIC would do?

Heart now pledges 30-seat hybrid electric commercial flights by 2028

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Re: Doesn't make sense

Harbour Air is currently running test flights between Vancouver and Victoria. They are 72km apart.

People in the know are aware of the concerns with running trains between these two cities.

EU puts smart device manufacturers on the hook for cyber security

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Re: Offline

Escrow means very little if you can't get access to proprietary compilers or obscure build instructions or obsolete (Win95...) build platforms.

China's single aisle passenger jet – the C919 – likely to be certified next week

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Re: Russian market?

ISTR that the airframe certification rules require any and all spare parts installed also must be certified.

Installation of grey market or homebrew parts results in a noncertifiable airframe that cannot be flown. At least, not outside of Russia.

Their collection of aircraft may soon become worthless.

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

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Embrace, Extend, Extract

John Deere has had many competitors, e.g. Massey Ferguson, who drove themselves into the dust with managerial incompetence. Deere just happens to be the last man standing.

The tech revolution in agriculture is just beginning. The combines and harvesters record gigabytes of data per hour. All is fed back to the manufacturer by WiFi and 5g. They then help the farmer "optimize" -- for a price -- their productivity and reliability.

Food is as essential as air, obviously, and if you can monetize the essential, and extract the "maximum" value from the value chain, you win. So say the MBAs.

It's worked for fertilizer producers, seed vendors, grain intermediaries, shipping companies. And it looks like it's going to work for John Deere.

Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C8H10N4O2

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Re: been there

We had a biggish machine room full of VAXes and Non-Stoppers and whatnot. We had many signs and rules prohibiting drink and drinking and food etc. etc.

One of the whatnots was a Microdata machine used by the accountants. It was a legacy (at the time) 8080-based multi-user system. Quite the gadget.

Being "legacy" it was carefully ignored until it didn't work. They sent a technician. Who upon entering said room pulled out his vacuum cleaner and blew about 10 years of dust all around our multiple VAXes.

By the time we saw it happen it was all over....in both senses of the word.

Nothing much came of it though. (We didn't even change the signs.)

Cyberattack brings down InterContinental Hotels' booking systems

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Re: Can't be bothered to spend money on IT

End of the day, the only gain to the attacker would be average Joe getting annoyed. Who cares ?

As long as you live above sea level, that is.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_control_in_the_Netherlands

www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2017/nov/03/three-degree-world-cities-drowned-global-warming

www.businesstoday.in/crypto/story/hackers-attack-goas-flood-monitoring-system-demand-bitcoin-340727-2022-07-07

Etc etc.

SiFive RISC-V CPU cores to power NASA's next spaceflight computer

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Covering your bases

The European Space Agency is doing a similar thing -- with their own tech firms.

Interestingly, it is a CPU with a "bootstrap option to select SPARC or RISC-V instruction sets".

I would like to see the boot sequence -- is there an instruction overlap that allows to distinguish the ISA? Do they dynamically change ISA depending on the phase of the mission?

How this Mars rover used its MOXIE to convert CO2 into precious oxygen

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"If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere."

Frank never knew.

Goodbye, humans: Call centers 'could save $80b' switching to AI

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Tin men

My mother -- 98 years old and still going strong -- objects strongly to the "tin men" that answer the phone at her bank. She did figure out how to get a real human to speak to, however.

Eventually her complaints were so bad we re-organized her bills so it's all automatic. She has no reason to phone them anymore. And we get no more complaints about "tin men".

"AI" or "bot" or "automated whatsis?" doesn't quite describe the tech. "Tin men" does.

AMD refreshes desktop CPUs with 5nm Ryzen 7000s that can reach 5.7GHz with 16 cores

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Record label drops AI rapper after backlash over stereotypes

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Other AI pretends to be Mozart (and so on) I didn't see any demands for someone's head on a pike for that.

The authors and their music are out of copyright.

DeFi credit scores: Coming soon to a blockchain near you

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monetizing bundles

So, the New-Finance credit-scoring companies want to monetize your transactions, by analyzing "bundles" of your wallets and their histories.

The traditional financial system knows this scheme intimately. Selling bundles of financial transactions and corresponding derivatives is big on Wall Street.

See the film "The Big Short" for further details.

"Bundle default swaps" is coming to a Web3 website near you soon!

Lloyd's to exclude certain nation-state attacks from cyber insurance policies

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Nation-state as the perp, or the victim?

Most commentards have reflected on the inability to reliably attribute the origins of a cyber-attack. As mentioned, the bad boys and girls can be anything from sympathizers to fully-involved gangsters.

The article also mentions losses due to cyber attacks against a nation state. Successful ones. That would be the catastrophe they don't want to cover. If Germany or Bank of England or US Treasury get completely disabled for weeks, well then, a lot of things would change, and none for the better.

The consequences to companies, whether large or small, in such circumstances, are unimaginable. And then there are the people, both employees and everybody else. No, don't believe it, no insurance scheme is adequate to such a situation. Best not let it happen.

Intel turns to private equity to help pay for new factories

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Brookfield

In Canada, Brookfield is well known amongst investors, mutual funds, and the like. They have several related companies all listed in Toronto and New York exchanges.

They are cash machines. They make a tonne of money every quarter. They are reliable for dividends and make people like me happy to have them for retirement funds.

But if Gelsinger ever needed instruction on the discipline of running a business, he will get it from Brookfield. Intel may not know who they just bedded.

Network congestion algorithms have design flaw, says MIT

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Re: Duh

There are a variety of TCP congestion control algorithms....

TCP Tahoe, TCP Reno, TCP New Reno and TCP Vegas...

Three guesses as to why the developers tend to rely on, umm, gambling towns as motivation for their codes.

Ex-HP finance manager jailed after going on $5m spending spree using company plastic

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Re: Addiction?

Addicted to "retail therapy".

Australian court overturns 'Google is a publisher' decision

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Where is the "Average person" in all this?

Surely there wasn't just one result in the search results.

Wouldn't an average person, even an Australian average person, review several articles linked and quickly discover the lawyer in question was not in fact convicted? Or even prosecuted?

This is called cherry picking. The one "defamatory" voice in a crowd of "100,000" links is not a convincing argument.

Discord details how it dodged latency with a super-disk made in the cloud

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"behave in ways that are nothing like their physical datacenter counterparts"

Things are not what they seem.

Pink Floyd - Sheep

Microsoft's Secure Boot fix sends some PCs into BitLocker Recovery

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Bitlocker

How very well named indeed.

Tech industry stuck over patent problems with AI algorithms

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Re: "Lawyers at Google are unsure if they can patent chip floorplans created by machines"

The "topography" of a chip can be protected by various means -- check out some photos of chips with an M in a circle, like Ⓜ, used in the US. (The means and methods of IP protection vary widely by country.)

How did you make this design? Lots of methods are available and some steps are patentable. Have a big computer? Try them all. Or use a machine learning system to optimize it somehow.

One question looms: once the designs get complicated enough, is an AI required to judge whether it is "novel"? I wonder.

NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS that can run on late-1980s hardware

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...and 32-bit SPARC boxes

Can we expect a review of SunOS soon?

Clean up orbit first, then we can think about space factories, says FCC

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the 50.4-51.4GHz range

is working to clear a path for satellites to operate in the 50.4-51.4GHz range

That's just 1GHz wide. BFD.

Modern optical and synthetic aperture radar satellites can generate gigabytes/s of data. You want at least a gigabyte/s or four to get the data in a timely manner.

While all sorts of expensive tricks can push a 1GHz channel to 4 or 5 or 6 gigabits per second downlink speed, it's not enough.

Show us some real bandwidth, please.

Apple tells suppliers to use 'Taiwan, China' or 'Chinese Taipei' to appease Beijing

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Airlines have been doing this for years...

The airport in Taipei is TPE:

British Airways -- Taipei, Taipei (TPE), Taiwan, China

Air Canada -- Taipei, Taiwan, China

American Airlines -- Taipei

China Airlines -- Taipei, Taiwan Taoyuan International (TPE)

Apple is late to the Party.

Why you should start paying attention to CXL now

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Goodbye Ethernet, I hardly knew ye

...instead of TCP and UDP over Ethernet, we're talking CXL running over PCIe.

Really dude?

Linux may soon lose support for the DECnet protocol

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How is this handled these days when the NICs are anything but DEC?

In fact all Ethernet NICs can change their MAC address upon command. That's how you get "random MAC address" options as a security feature on phones or PCs.

In DECnet, the feature allows to send a packet directly to the node in question since the necessary MAC address is a calculated number.

Contrast IP over Ethernet where designers added the ARP protocol to answer the question "what is the MAC address for 192.168.111.222?" Once you have that answer you can then send a packet directly.

Chipmakers warned: US CHIPS Act funds are not for 'stock buybacks'

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The colour of money

Politicians believe that money comes in different colours.

"Subsidy money", sales money, profit money, "windfall profits" money, and so on.

CEOs know there is just one colour of money:

Green.

Also known as revenue. Any revenue is good revenue, no matter the source.

Intel understands this.

Washington doesn't.

India signs local server-maker to build nodes for home-grown supercomputers

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Training

Delivering dozens of small HPC machines is for training students and researchers.

In a few years there will be hundreds if not thousands of people capable of effectively simulating whatever you like. From galaxies to gaming to guns. Spacecraft. Smartphones.

Then you might see India performing at a very high level of manufacturing and tech.

It's not a bad way to seed an economy.

Psst … Want to buy a used IBM Selectric? No questions asked

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get your Selectric free....from the KGB

Some might recall the bugged Selectric II typewriters placed into US and allied offices in the 1970s by Soviet intelligence.

They emitted a 4-bit coded radio signal that was picked up by nearby Soviet receivers. The radio transmission gear was embedded in brushed aluminum plates indistinguishable from the originals....fascinating reading.

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Re: Wow

I remember the 2741. On a 300baud modem to the local uni who were sponsoring computer education in our high school.

I learned to touch-type APL on that thing. Imagine that. To think I used to be able to write write-only code at 40 wpm!

Can barely open a beer nowadays.....

Don't dive head first into that crypto pool, FBI warns

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KYC

Legitimate investment managers have a mandatory rule to follow -- Know Your Client.

They must know the client's actual identity, their investment goals, their sophistication or lack, their total assets (rounded to the nearest, ummm, million), and so on.

For crypto-currency investors, here is a set of KYS (Know Your Scammer) rules:

- do they have a corporate name?

- do they have an actual corporate address that Google Maps demonstrates is not an empty lot on 8th Ave in Detroit?

- can you phone them?

- can you google them?

- can you identify the principals of the organization and get reasonable verification of their identities?

- are they located in: Cyprus, Antigua, BVI, Jersey, Panama or Delaware?

If any answers to the above are "yes", then run with your cash, and save yourself!

Improve Linux performance with this one weird trick

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Re: Disable swap

And some software uses shared memory which needs to be "backed" by swap if not an actual file.

Lesson learned the hard way when trying to use NFS for swap....it didn't.

Copper shortage keeps green energy, tech ventures grounded

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Re: Bloody batteries and solar panels

A couple of neighbouring businesses lost all their copper pipes and wires to thieves a few years back.

Their offices had outdoor plumbed pipes and wiring in conduit. One night it all got stolen; the local metal recyclers had no obligation to verify ownership or record the "identities" of people trading old pipe for cash.

It's a bit hard to run your dental business without lights or water!

And often you see municipal and regional infrastructure labelled with "contains aluminum wire" signs.

Five accused of trying to silence China critics in US

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wait a minute....

So these people are charged with unlawful surveillance, vandalism and arson, unauthorized use of law enforcement databases, conspiracy to libel or slander residents based on their beliefs......

I image there are a couple hundred thousand American women with abusive ex-partners who are now holding up their hand and saying: "hey, what about those things that [redacted] asshold ex-husband of mine did...." What about them, Mr Federal Prosecutor?

Double standard indeed.

NASA's CAPSTONE silence down to a software flaw

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Re: How to write space software

There is usually a "V&V" process invoked as part of system development.

V for verification:did they build it right?

V for validation: did they build the right system?

The failsafes like radios seeing no action for a few hours or inactive attitude control are probably lessons learned from long ago.

Space is hard.

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