* Posts by Bent Metal

35 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2017

China's DeepSeek just emitted a free challenger to OpenAI's o1 – here's how to use it on your PC

Bent Metal

Really depends where...

> Umm - street level is the GROUND floor in UK/Europe.

You should try shopping in Edinburgh, where the underlying hills make navigating a much more 3D experience than many other cities.

It's not uncommon to enter a shop, go up several floors, leave via a different door and be straight onto another street, at street level.

Cloudflare beats patent troll so badly it basically gives up

Bent Metal
WTF?

Re: Hey, I just got this patent for...

> Hey, I just got this patent for a wheel

You may think you're joking because hey, it's the wheel - but an Australian chap did exactly this to show the new Aussie patent system (in 2001) was broken...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn965-wheel-patented-in-australia/

250 million-plus unused IPv4 addresses should be left alone, argues network boffin

Bent Metal

it's from Plusnet

When I was with them some years back, Plusnet offered a single static IPv4 for a £5 one-off fee; and it appears they still do.

See "Can I get a static IP or an IP block" on Plusnet's website here: Understanding your IP address

They're a UK ISP, completely owned by BT since 2007 but operated as a separate concern for some unclear-to-me reason. Unfortunately, BT themselves (as a huge ISP) does not offer a static IP to home users.

Upgrading Linux with Rust looks like a new challenge. It's one of our oldest

Bent Metal

Re: Loss of Full Control

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain

-- Arthur Weasley

Xubuntu 24.04: A minimal install that does what it says on the tin

Bent Metal

Resizing windows.

Nice rundown of Xubuntu - most interesting to a longtime fan of that respin.

Regarding "We've also heard from people who find the very skinny window borders of Xfce make windows hard to resize." - In Xubuntu (and possibly others), the standard method I use to move and resize windows is with the mouse, though I get that some folks will object to having to press a key as well.

- To move, with LeftAlt + LeftMouseButton click & hold anywhere within the window to drag it around.

- To resize, with LeftAlt + RightMouseButton click & hold anywhere within the window to resize. The particular window edges that move depends on where you click, try it and see.

The borders themselves are really hard to hit with the mouse, though the top-left and top-right corners are a smidgen easier. But the Alt+Button combo is great...

I await with interest getting some time at the weekend to try Xubuntu Minimal!

US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 fighter jet has been dogfighting with humans

Bent Metal
Black Helicopters

Agreed - in my view one of those major issues is that it's just a few short mental leaps for the military to consider that if the AI can dogfight, couldn't it use the aircraft's missiles as well? Then the Powers That Be could have humans out-of-the-loop in a combat air patrol.

And then you get this again: Iran Air Flight 655 [wikipedia]

Your trainee just took down our business and has no idea how or why

Bent Metal
Happy

Re: Whoopsie!

>And that is how I ended up having to drive 200 miles to press a power button

...and in a perfect world, a followup discussion about the upgrade led the clients to use servers with a baseboard management controller, like HP's iLO or Dell's DRAC; so (almost) everything can be done remotely.

For an extra fee to the server vendor, of course.

We never agreed to only buy HP ink, say printer owners

Bent Metal

Re: Can you give me a model...

Very happy with my Brother colour laser MFD (DCP-L3510CDW), though from what you say you may want a different model with a feeder for the scanner.

Duplex printing is a godsend over the last printer I had.

The Brother is used to print mostly schoolwork for the kids, and as a mono or colour photocopier. I've a separate epson scanner for multipage scans, but the flatbed is useful for anything not conveniently A4 sized.

The Brother has driver installers available for both Windows and Linux(!), though the Mint laptop finds it and can print to it & scan from it without any extra drivers needed. Amazon for some replacement toner cartridges (3rd party, says "CoolToner" on the box). The black is already installed after a year of use, the three colour toners are still on the "comes with the printer" cartridges - though the yellow will need replaced soon.

Your mileage may vary, but the above printer has worked well for me.

Rust developers at Google are twice as productive as C++ teams

Bent Metal
Angel

Re: Quelle surprise!

...and that's why we repeatedly test the code.

HP exec says quiet part out loud when it comes to locking in print customers

Bent Metal

Re: Since then it has banked double-digit revenues.

I'm still very happy with my Brother colour laser / scanner I bought at the start of this year.

I've the replacement toner purchased and sitting ready, but not yet installed. Because notwithstanding the printer noting that the black toner is getting low, it's still happily printing away as and when needed - especially those occasional bits of schoolwork for the kids. And the prints still look exactly as they should.

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

Bent Metal

Re: It just seems that way.

@Jou - MP in this conversation is "Member of Parliament", i.e. an elected member of the body that gets to write the laws.

Linux Foundation and pals – including Intel – back software ecosystem around RISC-V

Bent Metal

Re: Intel feeling the pain? / Alternatively ...

"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" has worked so well for the other half of WinTel... why couldn't it work nicely here, assuming Intel wrangle a suitably large vote in whatever future direction RISC-V takes?

Seriously, boss? You want that stupid password? OK, you get that stupid password

Bent Metal

Re: root password?

> I'd be surprised if there was no root password though

That's been the default operation for many years now when installing Ubuntu, Mint etc. Can't speak for Debian.

The installer requires you to provide a username. That initial user is added to sudoers automatically and can sudo anything, including 'sudo su' or 'sudo bash'. As you note, the root user does exist - but has no password and can't log in on a terminal directly.

Astronomers clock runaway black hole leaving trail of fresh stars

Bent Metal
Headmaster

What would happen?

> ...no idea what would happen if one [neutrino] hit the exact point

Nothing would happen.

If a neutrino arrived at the centre (of mass) of the Earth, then as it speeds past the very centre there is no net gravitational force on it from the Earth at all. None. The gravitational acceleration due to all the various bits of the Earth exactly balances out to zero at that point, not to infinity.

The neutrino still feels the effect of the Sun, Jupiter etc, but it's a neutrino and it's got places to go...

New IT boss decided to 'audit everything you guys are doing wrong'. Which went wrong

Bent Metal

As I understand it, the "Work to Rule as sabotage" perception comes from larger companies or environments which were rather heavy with rules and regulations about who could do what etc.

For a techy example, you could then have a whole team reporting as being blocked because the printer was out of paper, thus they couldn't print their reports as per the handbook, and refilling the printer was a facilities job - and Dave from facilities was off ill today.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Bent Metal

Re: Serves Google right

To buy the odd wee something on Android but not put your credit card near your phone account: Get a £10 gift card at your local shop and use that for purchasing those "I really would like to support..." apps.

...if, of course, you want to purchase anything.

UN's ITU election may spell the end of our open internet

Bent Metal
Go

And the winner is...

It would appear "an open internet" is the preferred view; Doreen was elected.

The result is posted at the link below, which may and/or may not remain a link (due to my lurking way, way more than posting)

https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2022-09-29-ITU-SG-elected-Doreen-Bogdan-Martin.aspx

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Bent Metal
Facepalm

Re: "So was James truly the guilty party?"

I'm still stunned that - even after training on a separate, isolated system - someone could decide to try out a new idea for the first time ever on all of the production systems simultaneously

Maker of ATM bombing tutorials blew himself up – Euro cops

Bent Metal
Mushroom

Re: Pretty much standard

That FOOF article may be from Derek Lowe - and it's well worth a read. Apologies in advance, as I don't know if I can paste direct links...

https://corante.com/things-i-wont-work-with/things-i-wont-work-with-dioxygen-difluoride/

See also "Sand won't save you this time" about chlorine trifluoride, which ranks up there with FOOF.

The immovable object versus the unstoppable force: How the tech boys club remains exclusive

Bent Metal

Re: Hmmm...

> a) ...and women generally are ... less stupid than men.

Certainly to my mind, you lost your way at this point.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Bent Metal
Thumb Up

Re: Dumped HP deskjets some time back

> Get a laser printer.

Have to agree - when the kid's homework inkjet clammed up *again* after a short period of not being used, I bought a fairly cheap Samsung colour laser. That was four years ago, and it's only onto its first set of replacement toner. Not the most heavily used, nor stunning quality, but it's happy to be ignored for entire summer holidays and Just Print when asked to.

Train maker's coder goes loco, choo-choo-chooses to flee to China with top-secret code – allegedly

Bent Metal

"Citation needed"

You're missing the point of the Jones act referenced above. See for example Investopedia on the Jones Act.

"Perhaps [the Act's] most lasting effect is its requirement that goods shipped between U.S. ports be transported on ships built, owned, and operated by United States citizens or permanent residents."

Good ol' US protectionism means shipping goods along the coast costs more in the US compared to the same transport Elsewhere, as there's a restricted set of ships/operators legally allowed to do so.

Also, almost all of Europe is within 200 miles of a coastline. Once loaded on a ship, it's not just Europe you can move goods to. So outside the US, shipping is that bit more economically effective.

RIP Hyper-Threading? ChromeOS axes key Intel CPU feature over data-leak flaws – Microsoft, Apple suggest snub

Bent Metal

Re: Does it have to be completely disabled?

> The threads only have access to their own data when everything is working correctly.

Not so. The process owns the overall address space, and all threads in that process have access to all the user data within the process. This is why multi-threaded programming is hard; it's remarkably easy to accidentally stomp on another thread's data if you Do It Wrong.

Whilst there may be thread-local storage in play, it's usually very small in comparison to the memory owned by the process.

A quick cup of coffee leaves production manager in fits and a cleaner in tears

Bent Metal

Re: Not cleaner, but definitely a squeaky bum moment

Ahh, "triflouride". The following link describes it more than enough for me, and also has that quote from John Clark on chlorine trifluoride...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time

Disclosure: I am not a chemist (though I know a few) and I've never, ever messed with this stuff - but I found it an interesting read.

Take my advice and stop using Rubik's Cubes to prove your intelligence

Bent Metal
Boffin

Re: ICL - It Can't Last

Dear God, man - you can't just fling out nostalgia like that without warning, with no care to the potential effects! Now I'll have to show the kids what I grew up with, and why it's different from yet another "Funny Fails" et al on Youtube...

(and have an upvote! Link very much appreciated)

Euro consumer groups: We think Android tracking is illegal

Bent Metal

Re: Also consider Bluetooth

Garmin Connect - for all that nice fitness / activity tracking gear - won't even consider syncing to your Garmin device without Location turned on.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

Bent Metal

Re: click this

> No. Evolve doesn't mean what you suggest.

Evolve, as you note, didn't originally mean 'simply change'. But it *is* how very many people now use the word.

It evolved...

(and yes, some such changes drive me nuts. But many folk use new words or forms for successful communication; so much so that they are often added to the OED - https://public.oed.com/updates/ )

Dust off that old Pentium, Linux fans: It's Elive

Bent Metal

Re: we're not making the OS any faster but taking everything modern and paring it down

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

- Henry Peteroski

Sysadmin trained his offshore replacements, sat back, watched ex-employer's world burn

Bent Metal

Re: Timing is everything

X-Tree Gold... why that takes me back...</nostalgia>

Fermi famously asked: 'Where is everybody?' Probably dead, says renewed Drake equation

Bent Metal
Happy

Re: Not useful

...you wouldn't be here online, posting on El Reg

Microsoft says 'majority' of Windows 10 use will be 'streamlined S mode'

Bent Metal

Re: interesting [re:VMWare Physical to Virtual]

If you're going from Windows, then Mark Russinovich's Disk2VHD may work for you. I've used it on a Win7 -> VirtualBox migration and it constructed the VHD copy easily. Though getting that to then run under VirtualBox took some time; YMMV.

For the curious: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

Bent Metal

"no smart card support"

...well, you could just Google and find smart-card tools and libraries for Linux; first few results had pcsc-tools (which I've used) and OpenSC (which I've not).

Or just rant.

London mayor: Self-driving cars? Not without jacked-up taxes, you don't!

Bent Metal
Alert

Re: What about the downsides?

“A move towards new technologies like electric vehicles is likely to reduce taxation income for the government which could impact on the funding available for highway improvements,” said Kahn

and

TfL insisted that “a modal shift from car use to walking, cycling and public transport use is the only way to maintain and improve our streets"

Yet surely, if successful, such a modal shift in behaviour will also have a dramatic impact on congestion charge & vehicle tax income - thus impacting funding available for highway improvements.

Unless of course the endgame is to tax cyclists and pedestrians.

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Bent Metal
Stop

*bought* it?

You can bet your bottom dollar that we, the paying public, will never be allowed to *buy* the self-driving software. It'll be licensed to us, probably under insane terms that almost no-one will ever read.

And that's not the future. It's already here...

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/