Posts by rcxb

Free95 claims to be a GPL 3 Windows clone, but it's giving vaporware vibes

It's all in the qualifiers... Both the Z3 and ABC computers predated Colossus.

https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/

Re: But... why?

Nearly all games of the Win95 era were MS-DOS games, and for that we have FreeDOS.

For the few games or other programs requiring Windows 95, why not just run actual Windows 95? Why re-implement it? Nobody is going to be breaking down your door for dowloading a copy.

FreeDOS had some legitimate utility as many firmware upgrade programs and similar still ran under DOS when it was developed, and they indeed shipped them together with FreeDOS for several years. But who, today, has a big market for a product that needs to run on Windows 95? Who hasn't ported to newer platforms or gotten things working under emulation or other compatibility layers?.

Some projects remain buggy alpha messes for years, despite other projects with similar goals getting things completed quickly.

IOW, ReactOS's years of barely any progress is NOT indicative of how much time it would or should take to implement a Windows clone.

Colossus wasn't general-purpose like ENIAC, and being secret, it did not contribute anything to the state of the art.

Charles Babbage would like to have a word with you...

Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset

Re: Easy option

Just bring your borked device in store for a free replacement to the latest tech.

Several times I've been told by some phone rep to take my defective device to their authorized repair facility on the other side of the continent... When I explain that's impossible, they are usually dumbfounded... "But you're in the U.S.A. aren't you?"

Yes, I am... Please excuse me while I pull my hovercraft out of the garage, so I can start my 2 week drive from Hawaii to New York to drop off this TV for you.

When I ask if it can be mailed in, they often say something like "I guess you could, but that would cost you a lot..."

I find calling back the next day, I usually reach someone with a clue, and get a prepaid return label first thing, without asking.

Call it phone support roulette. Will I get a a quick and helpful response, or thrust into a topsy-turvy Sisyphean dystopia?

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Re: Amazing times

Both ships are magnificent accomplishments, unlike anything any government has accomplished.

NASA doesn't build ships. They merely put out contracts for private companies to build them:

https://apollo11space.com/meet-the-makers-the-private-contractors-that-powered-apollo/

https://www.spaceline.org/united-states-manned-space-flight/space-shuttle-program-history/

Maps of terrestrial fibre networks aren’t great. The Internet Society wants to fix that

Re: Just because you can...

The "bad actors" are builders with JCBs. If you don't put a warning sign above your fibre, expect it to be cut several times per year.

Once you have that, anybody can spend some time and make a map.

Re: A fibre network at home

Harder to lightning-proof your power lines.

You can get lightning arrestors for RJ45 as well, but switching to fibre can be a good choice.

uBlock Origin dead for many as Google purges Manifest v2 extensions

Re: Microsoft Edge entered the chat.

Chrome's extensive use of threading meant that the UI stayed responsive even while tabs were struggling to load / render. This made it feel faster than Firefox, which would look like it was entirely frozen while it was waiting on enough CPU time to render a complex web page.

Took years, but Firefox has improved. Chrome remains a memory hog.

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Re: Bananas

So YOU'RE THE GUY from all the cartoons, walking around buildings and just dropping banana peels on the floors...

Backup software vendor Veeam deleted forum data after restoration SNAFU

Didn't backup frequently enough?

So they restored a day-old backup, and there's nothing they can do about it?

So they weren't taking backups frequently enough to have a recent copy just before the overwrite? And/or they can't be bothered to compare two versions of the database, and merge the changes?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

Re: Seems to match

Equality of OUTCOME is a worthwhile goal.

Equality of outcomes means you have to force lots of people to take jobs they don't want.

More men in nursing, counseling, etc.

More women in sanitation, maintenance, and dangerous jobs in general.

Just be up-front about it, and tell people you want to take away their freedom to choose their own preferred careers. Then maybe there can be an intelligent discussion.

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Re: Old scams in new jackets

Realistically, if I'm going to scam, say, £500k+ from some company that thinks I'm a legit employee, paying a stand-in £2k to go there in person and pretend to be me is a good investment. I can make excuses to skip most face-to-face meeting, but can pay someone to go in for the final interview.

Re: Interesting

"There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest A.I.s and the dumbest humans." - Bears feasting out of trashcans

CentOS Connect conference announces return of Firefox

Competition is out there

Microsoft and Google are only too happy to provide RHEL-comaptible build and DNF repos for Edge and Chrome on Linux.

RHEL is really dropping client side usage hard. Looks to me like it's time to switch to AlmaLinux, because they aren't following RHEL down their self-desrutive rabbit-hole... Adding-back older driver support (still maintained in the kernel, but RHEL disabled so they don't have to support them), putting SPICE back in KVM/virt-manager, providing native builds of things RHEL is dropping, and even possibly keeping support for older CPUs a bit longer...

I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?

Re: Key - what key?

But if it is encrypted or compressed, you lose the ability to recover the rest the file from the point of corruption onwards.

A single bit-flip in an encrypted or compressed data stream does not necessarily corrupt everything. With something like LUKS2, flipping one bit will affect a block of 16 bytes. gzip may be recovered if you're willing to take some time/effort.

Many compressed/encrypted formats have a little bit of ECC or at least a checksum, so they may be able to correct a few bitflips, or at least it will tell you when you've got one, while the uncompressed versions will be of unknown integrity with NO WAY to find or fix the issue. More importantly, it is NOT OKAY to have "an incorrect character in a text document or database". Your bank wants to know whether you had $1 in your account, or if you had the $4,000,000,001...

See:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/684105

https://github.com/enssec/squashfs_bitflip_repair/

https://web.archive.org/web/20180708075208/http://www.gzip.org/recover.txt

https://www.urbanophile.com/arenn/coding/gzrt/gzrt.html

https://github.com/arenn/gzrt

Re: Key - what key?

Many regulations these days specifically require all of an organization's data-at-rest MUST be encrypted.

Sometimes the rules are quite vague, and sticking the key, base64 encoded and printed out on a sheet of paper, along with the backup may be acceptable.

Re: Each store was supplied a box of 10 DATs

DDS worked fine, but the capacity and speed wasn't great, and the drives sure did fail after a relatively short lifetime. And with the 160 (not 120) and 320 variants, they got quite unreliable, and considerably more expensive.

LTO-1 was a big upgrade.

As far as naming, they couldn't very well call it Digital Audio Tape when it was backing-up data with no audio, so DDS it is. They were DAT tapes, at least until DDS-160 switched to larger tape widths.

Robocallers who phoned the FCC pretending to be from the FCC land telco in trouble

Re: not sure how to read this

you should know the customers name, address, probably have access to an ID, etc.

That applies to the originating telcom, but not necessarily any subsequent telcoms that just transmit the traffic through their networks.

At the bottom of this article, Telnyx says they are the later:

"Telnyx [...] did not originate"

Re: not sure how to read this

is that a reasonable statement, or a populist appeasing rant ?

That's been an accurate statement since the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN protocols, procedures, and the laws like TRACED Act that mandated their use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

"The FCC also requires all providers—regardless of whether they have a STIR/SHAKEN implementation obligation—to institute robocall mitigation programs to ensure that they are not originating or transmitting illegal robocalls."

https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

Circa 2021-2022, carriers were required to stop allowing customers to spoof CallerID of whatever source phone # they wanted, and get proof that the customer owned any phone # they would be allowed to spoof. But there probably is some legal wiggle-room in how aggressively telcoms are expected to respond to block transmition of spoofed calls from less-scrupulous small (usually foreign) telcoms.

And yes, the SHAKEN acronym is rather tortured. An accurate initialism would be something long the lines of: STIR/SHAIT

Google: How to make any AMD Zen CPU always generate 4 as a random number

Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

Nobody expects The Spanish Inquisition number 4!

Re: There is absolutely no problem here.

Wikipedia says 0 is an integer. C/C++ `int` data types will happily hold zero. Seems non-controversial that 0 is an integer.

Now for the real question... Is 0 positive?

Re: In the Olden Days, Microcode

I've been waiting 9 years for someone to mention Pick, so I could post this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFpK8440HZA

Right up there with the MS-DOS 5 Promo, and Don't Copy That Floppy.

CompSci teacher sets lab task: Accidentally breaking the university

Re: In late 1977 ...

At least the network managed to handle the damage and route around it.

The damage was me...

*I* was the damage...

'Abandoned' astro takes recordbreaking ninth spacewalk

With lyrics...

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,

A tale of a fateful trip

That started from this space port

Aboard Boeing's space ship.

The pilot was a mighty rocket man,

The commander brave and sure.

Three astronauts blasted off that day

For a seven day tour, a seven day tour.

Ransomware attack at New York blood services provider – donors turned away during shortage crisis

Re: The question to be asked of all

If your IT systems fail, can you still do your job? If not, why not?

We're dealing with life-critical medical equipment, not milk. You need to meticulously track who donated the blood, from where and when, that it passed several tests, certify it has been kept in proper conditions, when it will expire, etc. The first person who dies from some pathogen in donated blood will eliminate any benefit to falling back to your stone-aged paper tracking systems (which surely don't meet modern safety standards and medical professions will scoff at taking any part of).

Do we really *require* IT to take and distribute blood products? It was managed before computers became ubiquitous.

Are you really suggesting that the pervasive computerization of the business world over the past century is just a multi-trillion dollar waste, and that computerized automation really isn't a labour-saving device after all?

Or are you suggesting organizations can just spin up dozens of secretaries, call center operators, human computers, mailroom clerks, pneumatic tube mail systems, etc. to replace all their integrated IT systems?

Only 1 in 10 Oracle Java users want to stay with Big Red

Non-Oracle Java

Even for old platforms there OpenJDK builds out there, they're just difficult to find:

https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-builds#openjdk-unofficial-installers-for-windows-linux-and-mac-os-x

https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild

https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html

https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads/

https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/

White House attempts to 'explain' mystery drone sightings: The FAA authorized 'em

Re: "Authorized" ?

I seem to recall something about drones weighting more than 55 lbs not requiring licenses (as was assumed, at the time, that only the gov't & "industry" had the capability [read: $$] to field such).

No, it's just that drones under 55lbs qualify for the quick online registration process.

Drones over 55lbs have to go through the full paper registration process that regular aircraft have to use.

https://www.faa.gov/faq/if-my-uas-or-drone-weighs-more-55-lbs-what-are-registration-requirements

Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts walks free as Trump pardons dark web kingpin

Re: sentenced to two life sentences, plus an additional 40 years,

That additional 40 years must be such a drag after having died twice in prison already.

The sentence passed in US courts are the MAXIMUM. i.e. Those who receive a "life" sentence can serve as little as 2 years (longer is far more common). A true life sentence is only when explicitly stated as "without the possibility of parole".

Multiple life sentences, plus extra years, is desirable in the event that one of the individual charges is overturned on appeal... the convict will still have to serve the other life sentence in that situation.

e.g. "So instead of the original charge and a possible sentence of two years in the brig, they've been found guilty on another charge and got an entirely different two years in the brig. That's going to be a great comfort to them." - Red Dwarf

And in the US, this differs from state to state, or state vs federal trials. Lots of details here:

https://recordinglaw.com/how-long-is-a-life-sentence/

This is the opposite of many other countries' court systems, which may sentence someone to a short prison term, then later revise it to be longer. That can't happen in the US. There are also no retrials in the US if someone is acquitted... the government gets just one try to convict, while convicts can repeatedly appeal to get sentences reduced, or fully exonerated.

Clock ticking for TikTok as US Supreme Court upholds ban

America is no longer America.

...and it never was.

Though I thought it was supposed to be "No True Scottsman"...

His job is to enforce the laws

"The executive power of the United States is vested in the President of the United States. That power includes prosecutorial discretion—the power to prosecute or decline to prosecute."

https://lawreview.richmond.edu/2018/04/08/the-president-prosecutorial-discretion-obstruction-of-justice-and-congress/

The presidential power of prosecutorial discretion is based on several Article II provisions, including the Executive Power Clause, the Take Care Clause, the Oath of Office Clause, and the Pardon Clause. Under Article II, the president may decline to prosecute or pardon certain violators of federal law. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed the broad discretion of the Executive Branch, holding that the decision “[w]hether to prosecute and what charge to file or bring before a grand jury are decisions that generally rest in the prosecutor’s discretion.”

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/jol/2015/10/15/prosecutorial-discretion-holder-memorandum/

Re: Impossible to ban?

Needing to sideload the app, and sign-up with a VPN provider, will be enough hassle that 90% of people won't bother.

The 10% that might do it, will soon find it turned into a barren wasteland without new content being created that would be of interest to US audiences.

Shove your office mandates, people still prefer working from home

I'd love to see the actual figure for how many do eventually leave.

At 54 "high-tech and financial" firms on the S&P 500 index:

"employee turnover rates spiked by an average of 14% following the introduction of RTO mandates. Senior-level staff and highly skilled employees were the most affected"

https://www.techradar.com/pro/forcing-workers-to-return-to-the-office-has-led-to-firms-losing-their-best-employees-study-finds

Euro-cloud Anexia moves 12,000 VMs off VMware to homebrew KVM platform

Re: "The CEO thinks more companies will move from VMware"

The cynical in me says that Broadcom would have better off gouging the little accounts for twice as much, because little accounts do not have the resources (time, knowledge and/or money) to migrate to something else.

The "little accounts" might do something extreme like continue to use their pre-Broadcom perpetual licenses without ongoing support/updates.

You also wouldn't see any new VMWare customers, as future employees won't get experience with VMWare, and med-large companies grown from little startups wouldn't ever have gotten a start with VMWare.

Hands-on jobs to grow fastest, because AI can't touch them

No more difficult than other jobs

farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers, sales people, and food processing workers.

There are robotic arms, robotic eyes (i.e. cameras), voice recognition, voice synthesis, and more. It's only the robotic brain that's missing. If A.I. was actually as adaptable as a human intellect, it could interact with the world and quickly figure out how to do such menial labor.

Of course it's not... L.L.M.'s are basically at the level of incompetent sociopathic interns, who will answer your questions with the first results they find searching on Google, and insist it is correct, no matter how many times you tell them its wrong, and never learn, anything.

Quantum? No solace: Nvidia CEO sinks QC stocks with '20 years off' forecast

Sounds good!

Shares in some publicly traded QC companies saw steep declines today, following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's CES rather reasonable remark that practical quantum systems may still be 20 years away.

Not as bleak of an assessment as people are making it out to be...

I wouldn't mind investing now, in some company that's going to be the Intel/ARM/Apple/Qualcom of the quantum computing world in 20 years...

Of course the question is: which QC company will it be?

And yes, it does sound like Nvidia is saying "Stop wasting your money on other companies' empty promises, and start putting it into our empty promises..."

3Blue1Brown copyright takedown blunder by AI biz blamed on human error

Re: There are more and more of shit like this

submit a false strike and you're not allowed any more for a month.

Processing DMCA takedowns is what shields corporations from being held directly responsible (i.e. sued) for any infringing copyrighted content uploaded by users to their platform. There is no exception allowing them to ignore DMCA takedown requests from bad actors. If Youtube started following your advice, it would be trivially easy for any company to start a multi-billion dollar copyright infringement lawsuit against them by just filing an incorrect takedown, followed by legitimate ones (that get ignored).

What Youtube could actually do, while staying within the law, is provide free legal resources (well-versed in the DMCA) to their customers, which would quickly review and files counterclaims and file lawsuits for damages (to the customer) against those who filed inaccurate takedowns.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

DDG right now reports: No results found for "DSCLI-7.8.59.215.iso".

If you fail to quote the file name, DDG's first link is: https://ftp.software.ibm.com/storage/ds8000/updates/DS8K_Customer_Download_Files/CLI/

Which does NOT contain that file name, but instead only extremely old versions, only up to 7.7 and below.

Google finds it now, first link being direct to IBM, second link being this forum post... it certainly wasn't months ago. It's possible they fixed some bug, but I rather assume this discussion got IBM's website back on Google's radar now.

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Keyword stuffing should be easily dealt with. Just look at the ratio of search terms to non-search terms.

Then you just end up with sites with lots of sub-pages with a few keywords each. i.e. "Gateway pages"

how about a search engine that just takes search terms with the usual operators of and, or and not, and gives the results that fit

That's how you end up with the first search result of just about any benign term being a porn site... Keyword stuffing is just too easy.

That's the kind of cesspool that the internet was in the 90s, up until Google came along and make search work properly, and basically revolutionized the internet, making it work as expected for normal people.

Now Google's gone nuts in the other direction, showing the most mainstream results and hiding so much of the less-trafficked web.

I can search for exact file names that I know exist out there, and find zero results. I happened to post one example of this here on elreg recently.

Unfortunately there seems to be no working alternative that does any better at this point.

US military grounds entire Osprey tiltrotor fleet over safety concerns

Re: ... a bit late, innit?

claims about hostage rescues only happens in the movies.

Stop talking bullshit that has never happened.

I don't understand people who spout nonsense that is easily disproven with the most cursory web search...

Recently, in June 2024 Israel's IDF rescued four hostages held by Hamas in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Hostage rescues were a regular occurrence during US involvement in Iraq, and not uncommon in Afghanistan. There are units like DEVGRU/SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force who "specialized in hostage rescue".

In October 2015 U.S., Kurdish and Iraqi forces freed around 70 hostages from an ISIS-controlled prison who the Pentagon said were facing “imminent mass execution.”

On September 7, 2005, Delta Force assault team landed in MH-6 Little Bird helicopters at an isolated farmhouse outside Baghdad, Roy Hallums, an American contractor, and another hostage were being held were found and rescued

On June 8, 2004, in Objective Medford, US Army's Delta Force rescued 4 hostages in Iraq. Helmet cam footage was leaked and is available on the internet.

These are just a few that happened to gain publicity. Most are kept secret.

Re: ... a bit late, innit?

The Ospreys performed ZERO rescue operations remotely similar to the Iran hostage crisis during IQ or AF.

Iraq and Afghanistan were not the places where V-22 Ospreys would need to be used. There, the US had bases all over on the ground. There were no missions out of range of typical helicopters.

if they did try the hostages would get shot.

That is a possibility in any hostage rescue mission.

Noise level isn't always a disqualifying feature, as landing behind a nearby hill or else generating other noisy diversions may be possible. Besides, it's not as though there are any entirely silent options...

You're free to say the US military should never try to rescue hostages, but at least be forthcoming about it, and not pretend it isn't the primary purpose of the V-22. I think many people will disagree with you. Besides discounting rescue ops, you're also promoting additional bystander casualties by saying missiles should (always!) be sent in, instead of soldiers in V-22s on long-range operations where no other craft can operate.

Re: ... a bit late, innit?

you could replace that with hundreds of cruise missiles.

Please explain how missile systems are going to rescue hostages... Because that's what the V-22 Osprey was designed for: Operation Eagle Claw in 1980 during the Iran hostage crisis.

Cruise robotaxis parked forever, as GM decides it can't compete and wants to cut costs

Re: This raises a question over how we treat tech doing things instead of us.

Apparently, humans are allowed to continue driving and killing each other but tech is not.

If you drag a pedestrian under your car, then lie to police while hiding the evidence that you were lying, you're not going to be allowed on the road for a while, either...

Cruise isn't folding because their cars aren't perfect... they're folding because they're just not nearly as good as Waymo, and management apparently doesn't believe they can catch-up.

Saying they're going to put the technology in private vehicles is telling... Sure it's going to have just as many accidents, but there you can always blame the driver for not taking over (ala. Tesla autopilot crashes).

Beijing wants Chinese outfits to seek alternatives to US silicon

Alibaba's Yitian 710 server-grade Arm CPU was rated in April as the fastest such processor offered

Yeah, but that's not being fabbed in China, so it isn't really a domestic part, now is it? That still leaves China vulnerable to sanctions. That specific

chip/design/company just hasn't run afoul of sanctions so foreign fabs (TSMC or Samsung) are free to run them off and ship them to China, for now. Not that I see that changing, as long as they don't figure out how to significantly boost the speeds and match up to the latest Intel/AMD chips.

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

Plenty of people die in fires who were not locked in but weren't able to get out

Yes, but we're specifically talking about the GP's scenario of being aware of a slowly smoldering fire "over a period of perhaps an hour or two". That is not the kind of fire that kills people, except perhaps those with existing severe health or mobility issues.

being stuck in such a place while the temperature rises and the air slowly fills with smoke is not a pleasant way to die

Is anyone that helpless? I'd have my keys in one hand and large coins in the other, quickly disassembling the door locks, gouging around the latch, hinges, or similar. Even just kicking a wall panel for a couple hours is likely to cause it to fail.

Besides, fail-secure rooms have standards to meet, such that anything remotely flammable is kept far away, and smoke alarms are actively monitored and will release the locks.

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: Context in reporting....

pooling on one specific spot on land.

Do you have any conception of where we're talking about?

The far north... 250km inland from the nearest big city on the coast, with its population of 650 people.

Residents of Camp Century weren't out hunting polar bears and setting up reindeer petting zoos. There's no animal life in the area, and very little could even potentially get there.

This is very much a tree falling in the forest with no-one around to hear it. Or at least it will be, in a couple centuries...

"eventually highly diluted contaminates in melt water could be released at the coast 250 km away, but even then it would be in the 22nd century or later" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environmental_hazards