* Posts by rcxb

788 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018

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Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Flow batteries

Article discussed stationary applications, so I was too.

Are there any viable mobile applications for hydrogen fuel cells? Hydrogen cars haven't panned out. Li-Ion battery powered cars ate their lunch.

I know *methanol* fuel cells have some popularity in forklifts.

rcxb Silver badge

Flow batteries

I fail to see the use-case of a hydrogen fuel cell, other than in space-based applications.

Whether you're using it like a battery (generating fuel on-site) or a generator (hauled-in via truck of pipeline) it will be cheaper and more efficient to do the the same with electrolyte (instead of hydrogen) for a redox flow battery (instead of a fuel cell).

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

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Re: And another one today

Mule-drawn canal barges are the epitome of transportation.

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

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Amazon dropping Android for Vega

Maybe this is related to Amazon dropping Android on their Fire devices for a much more locked down "Vega".

Microsoft hitched their wagon to the Amazon Android Store, which will be going away sooner rather than later. And they're not about to go to Google and have the Play Store on Win11. If they were smart, they'd switch to F-Droid.

As a matter of fact, I don't see that el reg has reported on that story. But we have no shortage of NextPlatform articles about a 3% speed-bump of whatever data center product.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-is-dropping-android-for-vega-smart-device-operating-system

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

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Non-Oracle Java

Cut out the Oracle stuff out before the infection takes over...

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/

Amazon goes nuclear, acquires Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650M

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Megaphone

its 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant

I love their chainsaws...

FAA gives SpaceX a bunch of homework to do before Starship flies again

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Almost there...

"If it had had a payload, it would have made it to orbit. Because the reason it didn't quite make it to orbit was we vented the liquid oxygen, and the liquid oxygen ultimately led to fire and an explosion ..."

"Look! I barely exploded at all."

"We can control that with medication."

-- Malfunctioning Eddie in Futurama Season 3, Episode 12: Insane in the Mainframe

Cybercrims: When we hit IT, they sometimes pay, but when we hit OT... jackpot

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Re: What does OT stand for here?

I had the same question as you, but a search for "OT and industrial control systems" turned up relevant results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_technology

https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/learn/topics/security/what-is-ot-security.html

https://www.tenable.com/principles/operational-technology-principles

AI comes for jobs at studio of American filmmaker Tyler Perry

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"I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it's text. If I wanted to write a scene on the Moon, it's text, and this AI can generate it like [its] nothing."

Hasn't he heard of matte painting, green screen, or CGI before? Cheap illusions have been standard since before films went to color...

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

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Re: Doesn't sound right

it does a battery good to discharge it occasionally

Not true of most battery chemistries.

and not be continuously charging it.

You can avoid overcharging batteries, without resorting to discharging them. It's common for smaller UPSes to be that stupid and just constantly float charge, but any large battery installations will have more intelligent charging circuitry.

Firefly software snafu sends Lockheed satellite on short-lived space safari

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I don't see why private space launch companies are getting all the flack. NASA's SLS and Artemis program are ridiculous square-peg, round-hole plans to cobble together the biggest political contributors' products into a basically unworkable layer cake of a moon program...

"at least 15 launches will be required to refuel HLS in orbit per crewed mission"

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

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Re: Idiots

from now on we simply speak of Doctorovian Enshittification

Is there another form of Enshittification you're trying to differentiate it from?

Hundreds of workers to space out from NASA's JPL amid budget black hole

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Re: They won't be off long

SpaceX makes the taxi, JPL makes the luggage... Not a lot of overlap. JPL folks will probably do better finding positions at robotics or other automation firms.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Adapt or die

100 year old house would be perfectly fine today

You wouldn't be happy about the knob and tube electrical wiring, the lack of insulation, the leaky windows & doors, crumbling masonry (chimney), etc. Sure, you can renovate an old house up to modern standards, but it usually costs more than knocking it down and rebuilding.

Where there's a will, there's a way to get US chips into China

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Re: Vanity

Illegal smuggling causes a MASSIVE price increase, which is nearly as good. It's not as though a single chip slipping through the blockade will unlock the secrets of the universe... They are needed in huge quantities.

If it would cost you 10X as much to buy a car as your neighbors, what are the odds you'd still buy one?

rcxb Silver badge

Where there's a will, there's a way to get US chips into China - Buy 'em, rent 'em, smuggle 'em

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew. Lovely big golden chips with a nice piece of fried fish.

Still no love for JPEG XL: Browser maker love-in snubs next-gen image format

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Write a javascript conversion library

We're in the era of javascript. Most sites don't work properly without JS, at least most won't load images. Why not write a JPEG-XL to (PNG/JPG) JS conversion routine if you want to use it. Will save you the bandwidth, and be compatible with all browsers, not needing to wait on browser maker support.

Netgear hauls Huawei to court over Wi-Fi patent spat

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Turnabout

Huawei was seeking to "put the squeeze" on companies for license fees relating to its sizeable patent portfolio in an effort to claw back some of the revenue it had lost

:sniff: They just grow up so fast. :cry:

Biden will veto attempts to kill off SEC's security breach reporting rules

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Re: Республиканцы

Republican party is a Russian asset. They are set to destroy America from within and enrich themselves in the process.

"No" to the first, "Yes" to the second.

Republicans (other than Trump) don't like Putin. Putin likes the Republicans because they're trying to destroy America. Republicans are right on the edge of being a non-viable national party, so they'll quietly accept Putin's help in any form that helps them win elections they might otherwise have lost.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Veto he should -- and must

So what's the problem

Laws are all about dotting your "t's" and crossing your "i's".

It doesn't matter how reasonable and common-sense something might be, if the law doesn't specifically say you're allowed to breathe, then you're going to get slapped by the court for breathing...

The one that always bothered me is the term "broadband" in the US Fed is legally defined as bandwidth of 25Mbps download speeds. So your baseband ethernet network at home is legally broadband, while slower 5Mbps DSL service (which is a broadband signal/service) is legally not "broadband." It's like they updated the definition of a "horse" to include cars, and exclude horses...

Windows 3.11 trundles on as job site pleads for 'driver updates' on German trains

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Re: Improvement?

the sort of hardware that went into a Windows 3.11 PC is getting rarer, and much is not manufactured any more.

For the most part you shouldn't need era-appropriate hardware. The OS doesn't need details on what type of RAM is in-use. Many/most modern PCs maintain DOS backwards compatibility. You might run into an issue if you still need an old ISA card (adapters exist that work for some), but PCI can still be easily found in specialty motherboards. UEFI firmware options in most systems allow USB keyboards/mice to be seen as PS/2, and SATA SSDs to appear as old IDE/ATA drives. Many video cards retain VGA/SVGA/VESA interfaces.

And if that's not good enough, there are emulators out there. You could run DOS and Windows 3.11 under a web browser with reasonable performance these days.

There's even active development in this space: "high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1"

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/win16-retro-development/

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Disappointed

nobody has suggested a TWAIN Driver

Be sure to stop by the office at 22 Twain St, for an interview with Mr. Lionel Twain...

Credit: Murder by Death (1976)

That runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this century

rcxb Silver badge

Re: A fine idea but...

And the flip side of that coin is not fearing fossil fuels enough.

Don't they? Have you seen the popular opposition that appears when the construction of a new power plant is announced in an area? Maybe people are just bad at appreciating far-away threats?

a few people died from radioactivity that one time, so we can't have that!

Nuclear power plants are a different type of risk, entirely. Unless you're directly downhill or downstream of a massive fly ash tailings pond, no form of disaster at a coal power plant is going to render your property completely worthless and uninhabitable for several generations to come.

On a country-wide scale, nuclear power is a better proposition than coal. But on an individual scale, nobody wants to be the one to take the risk to their own safety and assets.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: A fine idea but...

...people fear nuclear. They fear it to the point of irrational panic.

And no-one seems to mind my solar death-ray...

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Iceland

The low outside temperatures make cooling far easier than (for example) a datacenter located in Arizona.

Iceland has experienced temperatures high enough to require active chillers: https://www.plantmaps.com/en/is/climate/extremes/c/iceland-record-high-low-temperatures

So you'll still need to pay for that capacity, and maintenance of the units, which is much more difficult to do where the condenser coils frequently get iced-up, snowed over, etc. Unless you're Google, and can just shut off entire data centers.

There's a lot to be said for building data centers in deserts. Lots of unoccupied open land, efficient cooling with evaporation, ideal for on-site solar panels, few or no blizzards or ice storms (which have a habit of taking down electrical grids and make it difficult for personnel to come and go), etc.

More on-topic, nuclear power generation hasn't proven to be price-competitive with wind and solar, and data centers are a terribly competitive business where even slightly higher electrical rates raising their costs is very likely to cause customers to go elsewhere.

A lot of datacenter activities (eg AI training) can easily tolerate the additional few milliseconds latency for the data transfer from Iceland to mainland Europe or the US.

It's a logistical issue, though... How long does it take to ship parts? How difficult is it to get people on-site for occasional major moves/reconfiguration/etc. The added expense of trans-Atlantic rush shipping and costs for remote-hands could easily eliminate any savings from the lower electrical prices. Of course huge companies can make the logistics work, but most cannot.

One person's shortcut was another's long road to panic

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Re: Oops!

and where were the backups?

Article is talking about time-sensitive recently processed data, not archives. How many times per day do you run backups on your systems?

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

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Unix shell and web browsing

The Unix shell is a famously rich environment: hardcore shell users find little reason to leave it, except for web browsing.

Only because links/elinks hasn't been updated to handle CSS and modern JS nicely. Which is a real shame because I loved being able to browse the web (even huge complex pages) lightning fast with a tiny fraction of 1GB of RAM. Not to mention vision-impaired users who need to use a screen reader or other assistive device.

e.g.: https://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y223/mypapit/elinks.png

Veeam researching support for VMware alternative Proxmox as backup buyers fret about Broadcom

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Re: Citrix Hypervisor Formerly known As XenServer

The name change makes sense.

Citrix's annual name changes of all their products, and "sense" are mutually exclusive.

Burnout epidemic proves there's too much Rust on the gears of open source

rcxb Silver badge

Re: "Burnout"

Also it’s an American project. Remind me where all the English speaking IT people live

India, mostly.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

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What is the issue?

Story is incomprehensible.... Something, something, EVs don't work.... ?

Huh? What is the problem with EVs that's being reported?

"Still on zero percent, and this is like three hours"

Well sir, perhaps you should try plugging the charger into the EV...

The mention of pre-conditioning the batteries has nothing to do with the above.

Seems someone is trying to give the impression EVs can't operate in cold weather, when they obviously can and do. And to convey that impression, they have to made this story utterly devoid of information to ensure we can't figure out what the actual incident being reported is all about.

KDE 6 hits RC-1 while KDE 5 brings fresh spin on OpenBSD

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MATE and Budgie and so on can't do anything at all I know of that Xfce doesn't do

Well, XFce's Kiosk mode was in bad shape when I last checked, and there was zero developer interest in fixing it (eliminating it was proposed), so I doubt it has improved.

While we fire the boss, can you lock him out of the network?

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Hot backup servers?

power & cooling for servers is not a trivial expense

Depends where you are.

Some areas have cheap electric rates.

Some areas are cold year-round, and remote so there are no city gas lines, only electric. Before heat-pumps became cheap, resistive heating was the thing, so a few servers would just mean a bit less work for your heater, no change to your electric bill.

eBay to cough up $3M after cyber-stalking couple who dared criticize the souk

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Proxy bid

The fine was only supposed to be $1M, but someone bid it up at the last second... must have been bid sniping.

Biggest Linux kernel release ever welcomes bcachefs file system, jettisons Itanium

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Re: Depends how you look at it

Where was that point, because I didn't notice it...?

Here:

"developed ZFS for Solaris. They didn’t want it in a competing OS. They chose the license that achieves that." "How is that Linux’s fault?"

The AC implies it was Sun's/Oracle's responsibility to chose a license for ZFS that would be Linux compatible, and doing otherwise indicates they are intentionally trying to hobble other OSes.

Fairly sure SunOS predates Linux by a decade or so.

ZFS does not predate Linux. I don't see how SunOS enters into it.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Depends how you look at it

Both ZFS and btrfs are Oracle's "own software". Or at least both started that way.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Filename limit?

is Microsoft wrong to assume that “26 drive letters ought to be enough for anybody”?

Ever since Windows 2000, you can opt not to assign a drive letter but instead map drive partitions to folders on your file system, much like Unix does it.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Depends how you look at it

How is that Linux’s fault?

It's slightly more true that the GPL has "licensing restrictions".

It might be more fair to just say the the two bits of software just use mutually incompatible licenses, rather than pinning one of them as being the more "encumbered" preventing integration with the other.

Your point that Linux was around first is neither here nor there.

They didn’t want it in a competing OS.

As said before, it was adopted by FreeBSD quite rapidly.

One can even argue the ZFS license is actually compatible with Linux and the GPL, but Oracle has stayed silent and never offered their opinion on those legal intricacies, and nobody wants to be the first to try it and risk getting sued.

What if Microsoft had given us Windows XP 2024?

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The user commanded, the OS obeyed. XP did not "helpfully" turn options back on "for a better user experience".

Oh yeah? Try uninstalling Internet Explorer from XP, and let us know how it goes.

A tale of 2 casino ransomware attacks: One paid out, one did not

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restrict which machines can talk to other machines (but only if they're on different subnets which are routed via the firewall),

"Private VLANs" which is an option on most smart/managed switches, can put EVERY system on their own virtual subnet.

Certainly security on the host side is valuable, but "the network" could do a lot more for security. That it doesn't is because a culture of laziness, permissiveness, and insufficient security concideration permeates most companies.

CLIs are simply wizard at character building. Let’s not keep them to ourselves

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Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

That seemed to work reasonably well for you.

What is your better GUI alternative?

Will searching for "convert PDF to text" in Windows quickly find a solution?

Is there a "convert PDF to text" icon on everyone's desktop, or in everyone's applications menu?

Is there a "convert to text" option in the context menu if you right-click (or ctrl-click) on a PDF?

Does Acrobat Reader show a prominent "Convert to text" icon, when you open up a PDF?

I don't see this being a failing of the command-line. If you need to do something new, you're going to have to spend a little time figuring out how to do it, whatever UI you are using.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

but if you're asking a question like "What do I need to perform [action]", you don't have any way of finding that out quickly from the interface.

If you learned "man -k" first, you do.

And the GUI isn't any better in many cases. Sure, there's a list of programs, and a menu, and obvious close button, but more than that and you just need to start guessing, looking around EVERYWHERE, and just hope you get lucky and find the exact context menu you need.

How about formatting drives, or the famous example of ejecting a disk on a Mac?

In fact the Windows UI has gotten so completely unusable that a search function had to be implemented, just like you're at the command-line or something...

Going further afield, I'd also point to the IBM HMC web UI as a counter-example... There are so many different contexts, so many options in each, and many of those options go a dozen steps deep with sub-options that if you don't have any idea at all where to look it would literally take you YEARS to search through possibility. A situation that can be resolved by just having one page of common CLI commands... Compare to needing several pages of explanation for just ONE thing in the web UI, describing where to navigate to in the GUI to find the same info.

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Intuitive GUI? My arse.

vi and emacs are obviously the power-tool editors. Beginners should start with pico / nano / joe / etc.

It is possible to have one that can suit both, with a little effort. "lynx" is a good example, with its two lines at the bottom of help by default... something you can quickly go shut off in the settings. Helpful for beginners, and only slightly annoying to the advanced user.

Your landlord should offer on-prem cloud, suggests immersed datacenter upstart

rcxb Silver badge

Bandwidth?

The added cost of running several very high speed dedicated fibre internet circuits to your office building (on whatever edge of the city it may be) is likely to be more than you'd pay to rent space in a proper data center. This is not consumer level shared internet services we're talking about, but multiple dedicated 10Gbps links, preferably from more than one ISP... and each is going to make YOU pay for the last few miles of build-out cost to reach you. Compare to a proper data center where a dozen providers are already on-prem, and competing with each other to get their service that last 100m to your equipment.

And electricity? Even with just 1 or 2U, DCscharge less, all-in, than I'd have to pay just for electricity. Maybe your office building gets great low electric rates, having installed solar panels and batteries for shaving off peak electric usage charges to the point they can compete with a DC, but that's not been my usual experience. That's not even getting into the cost of battery and generator backup for power outages.

Not to mention that your building is simply now a 24/7 operation... needing on-call staff woken up in the middle of the night for every hiccup in power or cooling systems, with no down-time to schedule the occasional maintenance, either.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

modern linux has become, since systemd and cloud init and network manager and such.

Network Manager works great. If you've got a number of different interfaces that come and go (whether Wi-Fi or wired, whether automatically or something you just want to toggle off/on), the old method doesn't handle that well. nmtui makes it easy to set them up and manage. My only big problem with NMTUI is that it doesn't have a simple check-mark to send response to incoming packets on the same interface they arrived on. Gotta do a couple long "nmcli connection modify" commands to get that.

Systemd is a nice improvement too. Simple service file syntax, single line change for different types of processes (daemon/foreground/etc.), and a one-line config change to restart services when they quit... no need for some other service manager/monitor in parallel. It also has several features I find anti-useful, but still a plus.

How to deorbit the Chromebook... and repurpose it for innovators

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Re: Re-purposing Already Happening

educational concept should be wrapped around gendered stereotypes

Not that they *should*, no... only that there's nothing wrong with trying it out and seeing if it increases interest.

Those who are doing good work, at least trying something, should not be berated for doing so.

Political correctness is not a suicide pact.

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Holmes

Re: @RPF - Re-purposing Already Happening

No one ever asks why there are so few female sanitation workers.

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

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cost, reliability and serviceability were more important

Years back, a friend bought an old used Taurus, and asked me to check it out.

It had a plastic (likely ABS) splitter on the coolant system/hose next to the battery, with a very small takeoff going to a smaller hose. This looks like it: https://images.carid.com/gates/products/22337.jpg

I bumped said smaller hose, which promptly broke the small plastic bell-end and sprayed me with antifreeze. That's not what I call reliable or even particularly serviceable.

This came on the heels of having owned 3 Fords over the prior decade or so, which were all maintenance burdens. That Taurus nonsense convinced me to thereafter switch to buying GM vehicles, where I've never seen any such stupid and fragile powertrain components. Have had an extremely good tract record with GM vehicles since. (Better than Toyota and Honda vehicles owners I know, though of course it's quite a small sample size.)

rcxb Silver badge

Re: Interesting lines from the article

The article refers to sales of "light duty EVs and hybrids", which isn't a useful measure of EV sales alone.

...and you couldn't be bothered to click the link in that same sentence to go to the source and see the breakdown of EV sales?

Ex-school IT admin binned student, staff accounts and trashed phone system

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Re: The three rules of effective revenge

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-without-extradition

"France Has Extradition with US"

Someone better tell Roman Polanski

Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness

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Re: Every single time

I still remember it fondly.

Well then, it must not have been one of the units phuzz touched.

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