Posts by rcxb

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Remote development

Notably less helpful when internet access is slow or entirely unavailable, and all he can do is sit around doing precisely nothing.

Re: Green screens were great!

The most productive thing I ever did was eliminate the dumb terminals being widely used in my company.

With hundreds in use, there were several maintenance calls to IT about them every day. Users would accidentally hit Ctrl+S, power them off before logging-out, the program would occasionally puke dumping trash on the screen, etc. All scenarios users had no clue what to do about.

Poor descriptions of problems from non-technical users would lead the entry-level IT support person to always check the settings, verify the serial cable was working, often swap a keyboard (then need to test the removed one), etc. And this often took away productive time from the users, too, moving their desk for the day and whatnot. With a few hundred terminals, several people had full time IT jobs, for years.

All of this went away in a hurry when converted the terminals to locked-down kiosk Linux PCs running terminal emulators under X11. Everyone knew how to close a terminal emulator window when something went wrong, so no more IT calls. Not to mention the added productivity of everyone being able to have several different terminal windows open at once.

Euro watchdogs 'abandon $1b fine' against Qualcomm

Re: The EU is toothless

The privacy stuff only succeeded in making the web a worse place with cookie dialogs everywhere you go.

Correction: It makes websites of privacy-invading companies a worse place to go. I suggest you try going elsewhere. Plenty of websites do not have or need cookie dialogs, because they simply don't collect that data on anyone in the first place. What kind of cookie dialogs do you see here one el reg?

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

Government handout to ATK

The SLS was projected to cost $6 billion, and slated to launch in 2016. Now, with overall costs at $23 billion and $2 billion per launch,

Funny, because the SLS was supposed to be the CHEAP option. At least the cheapest one Congress would accept. The actual cheaper options didn't involve any solid rocket boosters, but Orbital ATK spread enough money around to ensure that nobody was allowed to interrupt their gravy train.

Honestly, the only thing SpaceX really has going for it is that it isn't tied up in the same political garbage NASA has to put up with.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Re: Degrees F

A very large part of North America standardised on Celsius some time ago

In a discussion of the Rankine cycle, how can we not use the Rankine scale for temperatures?

The US is 56% of the population of North America, so the majority does not use Celsius.

And the only appropriate icon for a debate over the benefits of metric vs imperial... Have a pint, mate. --->

Re: recuperator == heat exchanger

Your post is rather marred by incorrectly notating carbon dioxide as "C0₂" (with a zero) rather than the correct "CO₂" (with an "o") four separate times.

Tesla expands Powerwall-to-grid program to cover most of California

Re: $2/kwh is a lot of money

My electric rate is about $0.10/kwh, so that's 20x the market rate.

And just where are you?

PG&E's rate is about $0.34.

SDG&E's Tier 1 rate was 34.5 cents/kWh as of Jan 2022.

SCE's rate is around $0.30/kwh.

So just where are you getting electricity in California for 1/3rd the going rate?

$2/kwh is NOT much money for energy storage. Each charge/discharge cycle shortens the life of your very expensive battery pack... That's why the vast majority of folks with solar panels remain connected to the grid. Pulling power from a remote power plan is vastly cheaper than batteries.

The term for this is: Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS).

According to the first source I found, the Tesla Powerwall comes in at about $0.30/kwh LCOS.

If they were offering $0.30/kwh, which is 3X what you say you're paying for electricity, absolutely NOBODY in their right mind would sign-up... you'd be losing money.

Sources:

https://climatebiz.com/tesla-powerwall-cost/

https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/07-07-2022%2020:45:59.141/Peninsula%20Clean%20Energy%20(PCE)%20PG&E_ResidentialE1_07052022.pdf

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energy-division/documents/electric-costs/sb-695-reports/electric-and-gas-cost-utility-reports-from-ious/sdge--2022-recommendations.pdf

https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/08-18-2022%2015:28:16.665/Clean%20Power%20%20Alliance%20(CPA)SCE_Residential_08152022.pdf

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

Re: The truth is out there

> Lord, if you are American you get inherent privacy rights.

HA! US citizens do not have any explicit right to privacy. Only in the case of government/law enforcement agencies that there are specific restrictions.

And it's only a technicality that, since the CIA is a US organization, they have to follow some US laws regarding US citizens. The easy fix is for the CIA to just ask MI5, Mossad, et al. to spy on the US citizens for them, and hand over what they collect. And the arrangement goes the other way, as well. Politicians don't care about protecting the privacy of foreigners one bit.

Facebook hands over chats to cops in abortion case

Re: The Decline of the American empire

What you're seeing are the last gasps of a regressive political party that is no longer viable on a national level due to shifting demographics. Trump was guaranteed to lose the second time around because about a million of his supporters had died of old age in the four years since his first election. So the far right party is trying every dirty trick in the book to somehow subvert the majority and prevent themselves slipping into permanent minority status.

Specs leak of 5.7GHz AMD Ryzen 7000 chips with double the L2 cache

Re: But where are the "cheap" chips?

Fab demand is extremely high, so now is not the time to shop for a deal. Also, inflation is hitting prices everywhere, so £100 could well be the new normal for budget CPUs.

Microsoft extends life of cloud servers from four to six years

Re: Power

you need to pay to cool that 3MWH/yr also

With traditional refrigeration air conditioning systems, that only adds 1/3 to the power budget. But big cloud providers don't use traditional air conditioning, they run at high temperatures (so often need to HEAT-UP outside air they pull in), and often use evaporative cooling instead of refrigeration where needed.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY

Re: Power

maybe Microsofts spreadsheet needs to factor in this week's meter readings ....

Servers are expensive... around the price of an automobile. Their power consumption is relatively moderate these days. The purchase price of the server can far outstrip the cost of electricity to operate it, particularly if you can choose to locate your data centre somewhere with inexpensive electricity and moderate cooling needs.

Dell estimates 3MWH/yr on a heavy workload for their fully kitted-out R740 servers:

* https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/digitalassets/active/en/unauth/data-sheets/products/servers/Full_LCA_Dell_R740.pdf

Even using the UK average of £0.28 per kWh, that would be just £840/yr. At 5 years, that's £4200. You'll find that a fully populated new server costs considerably more than that, and that's not even accounting for the much lower electrical rate Microsoft pays. Locating close to cheap electricity is a trick Aluminum smelters have been doing for decades.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Database

No amount of caching can speed up that final step.

Sure it can. Your RAID controller with the battery backup just needs to lie to your database, telling it the write was completed to disk the moment it went into the cache.

Somewhere along the way you have to decide that a certain storage method is reliable enough, and that could be battery backed RAM (cache) just as easily as the SSDs its connected to.

You need to decide your trade-off. Others might decide that writing to a single RAID array isn't reliable enough, and force the database to wait until the write has been replicated to a second, remote storage array.

Optane was not necessary

You never needed Optane memory for that use case. In the old days, you could just design-in a battery backup system, and use RAM as your persistent storage.

These days, you can just go out and buy NVDIMMs off the shelf. It's a use case fully supported by common server boards. You don't hear about it because there just isn't a killer app where a non-trivial number of workloads see real benefits from it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM

* https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-r740/nvdimm-n_ug_pub/introduction

Re: Insane

the ability to access small files with magnitude lower latency than regular SSDs.

File systems already use un-allocated RAM space as cache. So you're talking about a very specialized case of lots of access to very small files (that can't be converted into larger files, like fields in a database) and also so huge a number of these files that there isn't enough RAM to cache them for higher performance access.

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Re: Heat island

It's a difficult problem, since airports need to be as close as possible to big cities, but cities don't want to be anywhere near airports...

Not difficult, really. Put the entry point in the city and have a tram every minute that moves people a few miles to the actual terminal near the runway.

Alternately, I'd certainly enjoy seeing a kilometers-long autowalk moving at 100km/h.

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

Re: Klipper or Marlin won't help here

A typical budget extension cord is not fit to power anything other than a lamp, phone charger or laptop but there's absolutely nothing stopping you plugging in something that will draw the full circuit current and -- literally -- melting wiring or sockets.

Actually, the earthing pin usually prevents it. Extension cords that can't handle the full 15A of a standard NEMA 5-15R are two-pole, no earth affairs (NEMA 1-15R) so you can't plug-in MOST high-power devices, which usually has/needs that third pin.

Those terrible extension cords aren't very common. Just a hold-over from the pre-1960 electrical standards, and only available in fairly short lengths. Still purchased these days as a cheap option for some low power needs like Christmas lights, but far less common a sight than the (orange) 3-pin extension cords which are quite safe, and rendered pretty uncommon by the rise of power strips/surge protectors (starting in 1970).

"its only 110 volts"

Also a hold-over from the 1960s. The US grid has been 120V for many decades.

Re: Possibility of irony?

I miss my dad every other day, every third dream

You should have followed John Cleese's advice and had him stuffed:

https://youtu.be/f74L2hRZE1Y?t=157

OVHcloud datacenter fire last year possibly due to water leak

Re: Interesting article marred by dreadful time formatting

Military timing is all good, but a : every now and then wouldn't hurt.

$ rsync -a "10:00" remote:/tmp/

The source and destination cannot both be remote.

rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1275) [Receiver=3.1.2]

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Micro USB

Both of you need to actually read the article. It makes it rather clear, early on:

"Now it's no more a Memorandum of Understanding and having all the leeway that [Apple] had during the past 10 years – basically to not abide by this MoU"

Re: Micro USB

micro-usb should never have left the drawing board

MicroUSB was considerably more durable than MiniUSB. That's really the only metric to use. What other data+power connector type do you think we should have used? Somebody needed to create it first.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

What about sc?

Linux has had a text-mode spreadsheet forever... sc (spreadsheet calculator). Currently available in Fedora-36 repos.

Wonder what Lotus 1-2-3 has that couldn't have been added to sc more easily...

The world has a plastics shortage, and PC makers may be responding with a little greenwashing

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

makes people who don't live in those places, complacent.

There's a corollary, however, that people who engage in token actions are less likely to take substantive actions to actually resolve the problem.

Reducing plastic pollution in the oceans can be most effectively done by spending money at the source of most of the plastic, not trying to prevent that last 1% from relative non-polluters.

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

I wonder who DOES dump all of that plastic?

As of 2019, "Asia accounts for 81% of global plastic inputs to the ocean." * They frequently lack the sanitation infrastructure the western world has, as well as environmental laws. Dumping trash into rivers, where it gets flushed out to sea, is not just an occasional happening but the standard method of disposal.

* source: ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

Google bestows improved device management tools, authentication options on Chrome OS admins

It doesn't need to be all in the browser. I've put together Linux systems with locked-down Kiosk desktops, and also had no problems at all.

One of those icons is a web browser, but native programs are better where available. Much less bandwidth used, and performs very well on even old slow hardware. Still a locked-down, unprivileged user experience with no way to install programs, or even run anything they haven't been given access to.

Of course it's easier to get started when someone did the work for you, but more difficult when you find you need to do something more than the lowest-common-denominator use-case.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

"And if you do bring your own commerce engine, you keep 100 per cent of your revenue, we keep zero."

24th June, 2021. Keep the date. This is the kind of promise that will get slowly watered down a bit at a time, until nobody makes a fuss when it is reversed entirely. At least, assuming they're successful in driving more developers to use their "Store". This sounds like Microsoft from the old days, promising vendors everything, then doing the opposite.

Boffins promise protection and perfect performance with new ZeRØ, No-FAT memory safety techniques

Obligatory

ZeRØ provides protection with zero measured performance loss – hence the name.

Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?

Price-capped broadband on hold for New York State after judge rules telcos would 'suffer unrecoverable losses'

Arbitrary number

How did the state come with the $15 as the magic number? Would $20/mo have bankrupted low-income families? $25? Did the state make any attempt to determine the costs of providing the service, before naming a figure?

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

I'd want to see a second layer of protection against misbehavior, not just trying to make their software perfect and bug-free.

G7 nations aim for global 15 per cent tax on big tech and bin digital services taxes

Re: Too soft too weak

It's true. They can sell the products at lower margins instead of marking it up the entire 15%, which they will do if competition forces them to keep prices down.

Tech scammer who fooled Cisco, Microsoft and Lenovo out of millions jailed for more than seven years

Re: Skills

You develop a higher tolerance for such hassles when you know you're getting good money out of it. Would you go sit in an office of cubicles all day if no-one was paying you to do so?

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Higher datacenter temperatures contributing?

One has to wonder if the sauna-like temperatures Google and Facebook are increasingly running their datacenters at, is contributing to the increased rate of CPU-core glitches.

They may be monitoring CPU temperatures to ensure they don't exceed the spec sheet maximums, but any real-world device doesn't have a vertical cliff dropoff, and the more extreme conditions it operates in, the sooner some kind of failure can be expected. The speedometer in my car goes significantly into the tripple-digits, but I wouldn't be shocked if driving it like a race car would result in mechanical problems rather sooner in its life-cycle.

Similarly, high temperatures are frequently used to simulate years of ageing with various equipment.

NASA to return to the Moon by 2024. One problem with that, says watchdog: All of it

Re: Hurry up guys

put up the Moon’s first National Park sign at the Apollo11 landing site. Where leaving footprints would be banned.

I look forward to seeing them install the asteroid defence missile system to protect the site.

Re: Hurry up guys

When did the moon become a US posession?

An internationally protected place or world heritage site would be better.

The moon is not on our world, either. "Moon heritage site" doesn't have the same ring.

US Patent Office to take only DOCX in future – or PDFs if you pay extra

worst-case rely on character recognition techniques to scrape the text into an easier format.

Well that's not a fair comparison. Somebody could scan a piece of paper and insert it as an image into an DOCX file just as easily. PDFs (that aren't just images of scanned pages) are trivially easy to extract to images and text.

Amazon puts an $8.5bn MGM in its shopping cart, clicks on checkout

Re: disappointing quality of movies out of Hollywood

I am also getting bored with everything depending on evermore outrageous CGI

It was the improving technology of special effects which gave us the blockbuster (and predominantly sci-fi) film boom of the 80s & 90s.

CGI has the potential to make it cheaper and easier to make better, more imaginative films. That reality hasn't worked out that ways is not the fault of the technology, but unrelated studio issues.

Apple's iPad Pro on a stick, um, we mean M1 iMac scores 2 out of 10 for repairability

I'm surprised they didn't cut out the USB sockets lest you plug in any non-Apple drives!

No point in that. Wi-Fi chipsets are cheap and low-power enough they can be included in USB drives. A bit like the old personal FM transmitters...

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Re: Poor sod..

A telephone can potentially fail. Getting wet will do it.

A better option, or at least a good backup in most cases is having a whistle on your keys. Will cover great distances with very little effort. The recommended distress signal option for hikers as well.

Help wanted, work from anywhere ... except if you're located in Colorado

Re: Top Tip

State income tax is fairly insignificant next to federal income taxes (and related federal withholdings).

A quick lookup seems to show New York state income tax rate at 5.99%, while Colorado is 4.63%. Not a huge difference. Worth paying if you can negotiate a 2% higher salary out of it (higher cost of living area).

Plus you could move shortly after getting the job. You'd probably have to pay income taxes in both states for the period that you are faking your mailing address, to ensure neither state can arrest you for tax fraud... They NEVER object to getting MORE in taxes than they're owed.

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

Re: not just umn.edu

Those other identities / personas won't be "trusted" by the kernel developers, so there's no reason to worry about them. They were only successful because they were associated with a group that has been reliable and trustworthy in the past. Unless they have similar connections to other organizations, it's a non-issue.

Apple's macOS is sub-par for security, Apple exec Craig Federighi tells Epic trial

Re: Keeping things secure

You can't run .exes or other binaries from Windows with a click these days.

What? Of course you can.

Re: Keeping things secure

If you gave Linux to your typical office desktop users, you'd have as many, if not more, of the same security breaches.

We have an office full of Linux systems, and never had a single breach. A big part of that is that users are just that. Locked-down user, no privileges to install anything.

With Windows, you can't even set-up two users on the local system to be able to access the same set of files, without making them administrators. Search for "unable to take ownership". You'll see lots of resolutions options like disabling UAC, which is both a terrible idea, and still doesn't work. You can set all the ACLs on the files and folders correctly to allow two users full access to them, but Windows only recognizes one owner, and won't let you open and modify those files until you're the owner, which you can't make happen unless you're also an administrator...

Linux is designed to be a sane, multi-user operating system. Windows has only just the basics of multi-user operation tacked-on, poorly.

And if users were allowed to install software, they would only be doing it from the repos... Careful use of sudo can allow them to do that, without giving them full root permissions. And those Linux software repos are still curated and extremely, without being locked-down with onerous restrictions and fee demands like Apple does with their store. Whereas the very model for Windows software installation has for decades been "download binaries from websites on the internet and run them, and say yes when asked if they should be allowed to do absolutely anything to your system" which is the real security nightmare.

Linux doesn't let you run exe's or other binaries from files attached to e-mails with a click. Linux doesn't hide (crucially important on Windows) file extensions from you, allowing attackers to mask executable code as innocuous images or other documents.

And should we talk about auto-run?

This is just scratching the surface. The list of ways in which Windows is inherently insecure is legion.

Apple announces lossless HD audio at no extra cost, then Amazon Music does too. The ball is now in Spotify's court

Re: Yay!

Converting an analog medium into a digital representation and then back to analog again is, to put it mildly, less than ideal

On the contrary, converting to digital is the only way to ensure you can perfectly reproduce the analogue signal.

If you are doing digital sampling above the Nyquist rate (right about double the sound's highest frequency), the digitizing process is provably perfect. What the ADC input picks up will be the exact same waveform the CD spits back out. It's math.

Digital media formats have error checking and correcting codes, which are not possible in the analogue realm. Analogue media just wears out imperceptible until it progressively becomes impossible to ignore.

Colonial Pipeline suffers server gremlins, says it's not due to another ransomware infection

Re: "but then opted to restore from its own backups anyway"

Not necessarily. They may have restored from a previous backup to get their system up and running quickly, but would have still needed the decryption tool to get the most current data (e.g. sales) for use later. It's a shame the criminals didn't want more.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

But in practice, the reason you weren't developing it yourself in the first place is likely because you lack the ability to actually do so.

Unlikely. The #1 reason is because somebody is doing it (for free) for you already, so why put any time/effort/money into it when it needs none? When the project dies, that calculus changes.

Also, if you can't afford to fund a few modifications to an open source project, what are the chances you could have afforded the license cost for the proprietary version in the first place?

I know of MANY small companies that have gone out of business when a proprietary piece of software (which they relied on) changed its license terms or greatly increased the price. I can't think of ANY cases where an open source project being abandoned resulted in the same... When its open source you have so many options, where with proprietary software you have just the one choice.

Chinese rocket plunges into Indian Ocean, still lands sharp rebuke from NASA

Landing in water?

no one could predict its exact destination, other than a 70 percent chance it would be in water

Thank goodness it didn't target my teacup while I was holding it.

Google will make you use two-step verification to login

Actually intercepting someone's SMS messages can be done quickly, easy, and undetectably:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3g8wb/hacker-got-my-texts-16-dollars-sakari-netnumber

Telcos crammed 8.5m fake comments against net neutrality into FCC's inbox

Re: Or, ya know, just issue people a government digital ID?

Schools typically issue student IDs to everyone, which are rather universally accepted as valid ID for minors.

Adults (old enough to drive) can get a cheap state photo ID without the driving test, typically through the same process, if desired.

Day 3 of the Apple vs Epic trial: What actually is an iPhone anyway?

Re: This is supposed to go on for another three weeks, right?

So a keyboard is now two accessories?

No, that's just one. But if you're not holding the iPad, you probably need something to stand it up, too.

if you're going to be doing serious typing then a real keyboard is required, but that's the same on all devices.

Which is why all other devices include a keyboard.

as for the dumb terminal... what exactly are you connecting to?

Local/offline mode. Just echoes what you type to screen. Hit the Print Screen button to output it to the connected printer.

The idea is to have a low distraction environment. The WiFi was often switched off

That works well on a laptop, too. Also see typewriter and dumb terminal comment above.

Re: This is supposed to go on for another three weeks, right?

You can write text on an iPad? And you only need a couple accessories to do it? Wow! IOS is getting close to parity with typewriters and dumb terminals...