Posts by rcxb

Huge if true: If you show people articles saying that Firefox is faster than Chrome, they'll believe it

Funny

Funny because that's how we ended up with Firefox. It was touted as so much faster and lighter than the Mozilla Suite (now called Seamonkey) when in reality it was almost exactly the same, but work pivoted over to Firefox.

As a result, we don't all have an HTML editor installed as part of our browser which made it easy to clean up a page before printing it out and was the obvious choice for quick word processing. Not to mention needing to install a mail application separately. Seems everyone forgot the lessons Netscape taught us back in the 90s.

And Chrome came along and claimed to be fast as well. Never mind it was an absolute monster, and only appeared to be faster because the UI was a separate thread that stayed responsive while heavy web-page processing was going on.

It seem fitting Firefox will flip the script and just pronounce itself the fastest.

Brave buys a search engine, promises no tracking, no profiling – and may even offer a paid-for, no-ad version

Re: Results

As much as I hate to admit it, Google still gives the best search results most of the time.

I get BETTER results from DDG most of the time.

I often try google when a ddg search doesn't turn up what I want, and either google: A) Only turns up some spam pages that ddg did not, or B) Ignores some of my search terms, and inundates me with irrelevant nonsense.

Only two thing I can think of that Google does betters. 1) Searching for EXACT file names and 1) More aggressively guessing you might have meant to search for popular term X instead of the correctly spelled but less popular word Y.

Having said that, the first example I thought up off-the-cuff shows the opposite in reality... A search for "googol" on DDG guesses you might want "Google", while the same search on Google does NOT suggest a correction.

Spotify to introduce lossless audio streaming: Better sound or inefficient gimmick?

Re: FLAC

MP3 is not the best lossy audio format available, for many reasons I won't get into here, and will never sound perfect.

Try your test again with Musepack at standard (~160kbps) or MP2 (Musicam) at 192kbps and you won't have the distortion of cymbals and the like. Both are temporal domain codecs. MP2 has a bad reputation from DAB, but that's only because broadcasters insist on using it at terribly low bitrates.

Huawei loses attempt to rescue CFO Meng from US clutches despite using 140-year-old law in High Court

Re: Don't break my laws but I can break your laws

How would this be going if the Chinese had forced the arrest of an American who they claimed was responsible for a shadow company set up to evade Chinese sanctions on Taiwan, thereby breaking Chinese law?

Except we're talking about international sanctions, which Canada imposed as well:

https://www.international.gc.ca/world-monde/international_relations-relations_internationales/sanctions/iran.aspx?lang=eng

...not just one single country's laws.

And China would be stupid to start making arrests like that, because the business community would absolutely start to flee the country.

Toxic: Intel ordered to pay chip fab worker almost $1m after he was gassed at its facility in 2016

Re: We have well-documented processes

The lessons learned from Bhopal are that it's better to subcontract operations and shift the risk to smaller entities, and that the possible penalty is less costly than following all proper procedures all the time.

Texas blacks out, freezes, and even stops sending juice to semiconductor plants. During a global silicon shortage

Re: The Real Story from Texas

Texas regularly buys and sells electricity to surrounding states and anyone who tells you differently is repeating false information.

Yeah, but being on a separate grid means the interconnections with neighboring states are fewer and more expensive. It is a significant factor in the current problem, even if it commonly gets oversimplified down to inaccuracy.

I seriously doubt any subtropic climate areas could handle these temperatures and the ice storms

I can assure you, the entire Southern US could handle it, including areas with even more favorable temperatures. Just not Texas.

Texas insists on having "a completely independent [electric grid] unable to borrow power from other states," as the article mentions. Other areas of the US would just have to adjust their supply mix as needed. Perhaps requesting customers try to conserve wherever possible, but nothing remotely like Texas is putting its citizens through right now.

Voyager 2 receives and executes first command in 11 months as sole antenna that reaches it returns to work

Re: It's a different world

Pollution is a much different situation than eyesores. You can't have an invisible eyesore.

And a half-mile off trail in Yosemite is somewhere people are likely to see it. A small object millions of miles away from any human, is somewhere people will never see it.

Re: It's a different world

that's a flying billboard. It's a fucking advert. An eyesore.

Have you ever seen it... with your eyes?

Pollution. In space.

Yeah. Nothing worse than when your space dust gets a car on it...

Microsoft says it found 1,000-plus developers' fingerprints on the SolarWinds attack

Re: Oh those Russians!

There's a little bit of us vs them when it's government vs government exfiltrating secrets, but more often, there are moral judgements involved.

Not much outcry from the West when Russians were breaking into and disrupting ISIS computer system.

Ther would be plenty of outcry from all corners if the US Gov got caught breaking into a private company to steal trade secrets (which is China's current modus operandi).

There have been outspoken concerns about this possibility from allies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Concerns

VMware very strongly suggests TPM for all servers in tightened vSphere security guide

Shell warning

Why is VMWare so opposed to shell access? SSH has proven far more secure than VMWare's own services (see: slpd exploits).

And when you really need shell access to your ESXi instances is exactly when you'll be unable to enable them (over the network via web interface).

At least if they had an option under F2 on the console to turn it on and off I might consider it, but no, you can restore the whole system to defaults, but you can't turn on a console where you can do some real debugging / repairs when you need to.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

Re: This is why they should be banned.

We've established that guns are common in the US, and so are expected to account for a large number of deaths. If they weren't, it isn't likely the homicide rate would go down much.

Certainly, Canadians have plenty of guns, but they are just as happy to stab you as shoot you:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/canada-gun-facts-crime-accidental-shootings-suicides-1.4803378

Re: This is why they should be banned.

it's probably a bad idea to go around with real knives "prank" robbing people

True whether guns are restricted, or not... The guy carrying a tire iron will end you almost as quickly as one carrying a gun.

Linode ponders adding Windows servers to its fluffy clouds of Linux-only boxen

A bit of a trap

Providing Linux servers, everyone is on equal footing.

With Windows, Microsoft can change the terms (or how aggressively they enforce those terms) whenever they desire. Perhaps coincidentally making a change that makes Windows very expensive for you, while being nice and cheap on Azure.

I much prefer to avoid that trap. If I need some Windows program, I'd rather sink my time and money into improving WINE, instead of paying Microsoft in perpetuity.

Someone tried to poison a Florida city by hijacking its water treatment plant via TeamViewer, says sheriff

Re: For the love of the wee man

Why on earth are critical facilities like this on the internet at all?

Right, the critical control systems should be on private networks that cannot be reached from the internet.

And to make sure personnel can be alerted when there's a problem with the system, there should be a SolarWinds instances that can access the internet as well as the private, critical, sensitive network for proper monitoring and alerting.

Problem solved.

After 7 months and 500 million kilometres, the Emirates Mars Mission has to endure 27 nail-biting minutes of engine burn

Re: Love all this space exploration

Let’s get to the moon again before I die

How would you feel about being propelled directly into the surface? Quite precisely satisfies your requirements and needs less fuel with not slowing down to get into orbit, or for the return journey. Two birds, one stone and all.

Terraria dev cancels Stadia port after Google disabled his email account for three weeks

Re: Google

If you're using a free-tier service you have zero support from Google.

But he claims to have spent "thousands of dollars of apps on Google Play," so he's far from the "free-tier"

How do you fix a problem like open-source security? Google has an idea, though constraints may not go down well

Huge hassle to address non-problems

This sounds like "security theatre." Google wants to pin down the identities of all code contributors. What percentage of exploitable bugs in open source code would you say were introduced by malicious actors thus far? They've put together an onerous system that's going to drag down everyone, just to make sure that 1 in 100,000,000 thing doesn't happen.

That would be a great idea to implement at SolarWinds, but just rubbish for open source projects.

Accused murderer wins right to check source code of DNA testing kit used by police

Re: Go for it

Any system that is used to help convict people should be developed to the same standard as "life critical" systems (e.g. medical, avionics, automotive) - especially if it is being used in a region that has the death penalty.

You mean every cheap surveillance camera now has to have its code and firmware tested like Avionics software now? Bugger

ThinkPad T14s AMD Gen 1: Workhorse that does the business – and dares you to push that red button

Re: Terrible keyboard positioning

Now everyone uses laptop keyboards,

Do they? Plenty of people use normal PCs, at home and in offices.

you hardly hear about carpal tunnel syndrome any more. Coincidence?

Yes, a coincidence. Just another media panic-of-the-week. Just like you don't hear about cell phones causing cancer much anymore.

Terrible keyboard positioning

Why do almost all laptops have the keyboard pushed back against the screen? Does anybody use a desktop computer that way, pushing your keyboard back so that it touches the screen? Then some extra high wrist rest so your hands are forced to be higher than the keyboard?

I'll give the UMPCs some slack, as they have no room to reposition things: https://www.sony.jp/vaio/products/P11/index.html

But why does everyone else go with that same terrible design?

Rubbish software security patches responsible for a quarter of zero-days last year

Re: "We need correct and comprehensive patches for all vulnerabilities from our vendors," she said.

release a product riddled with flaws and rely on point fixes after the fact to eliminate them. In no other branch of engineering would this have passed muster

In the physical world, there are a number of engineered structures that require almost constant maintenance. Everything from non-stop re-painting of large bridges, to road maintenance, consumable items with expiration dates, and more.

If you treat software as a single deliverable that must work perfectly when delivered (like an air conditioner, bicycle, etc), then you rather have to forego any expectations of software updates (whether for security or new features) as well. After all, you signed-off on the perfection of that deliverable unit, and in analogy, the manufacturers of those equivalent items aren't going to come out and improve units they've previously sold you.

Synology to enforce use of validated disks in enterprise NAS boxes. And guess what? Only its own disks exceed 4TB

I hate to defend them, but with the increasing monopolization of the shrinking hard drive market, manufacturers are brazenly pulling anti-customer moves like WD selling their RED drives with SMR tech, which causes huge problems in RAID arrays. Companies putting pressure on hard drive manufacturers, telling them their drives won't end up on the "supported" list if they pull moves like that, is about the only way to stop them misbehaving.

But it is most unusual for a vendor to specify hard disk drives bearing its own firmware as the only way to operate at a certain capacity.

Actually no. In the low-end consumer space it's unusual. In the Enterprise space it's extremely common. You're not putting any old drives in your NetApp SAN. A few years back it was common for servers not to recognize 3rd party drives at all, while now it's more common for them to just warn that your warranty and emit alert about it like your equipment is on fire...

Intel to finally scatter remaining ashes of Itanium to the wind in 2021: Final call for doomed server CPU line

HP took over DEC and canned their Alpha processor line

Compaq discontinued the Alpha in favor of Itanium before the HP merger, and sold their tech and engineers to Intel. And it wasn't just them, SGI gave up their MIPS CPUs in favor or Itanium as well. IBM, NEC, Fujitsu, Sun, Dell, and more were all making Itanium systems, even if they didn't bet big on it, as others did.

The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software goes offline for good

Re: One of those programs cast a long shadow

You're a dense one, aren't you?

Looking INSIDE 777004b1.zip, the timestamp on 777.exe is March 1998.

The most recent date in the History.txt (changelog) file? Again, "1-Mar-1998"

you did not run across 7Zip or 7z compression in "the mid 90s" as you stated

Once again, you simply didn't bother to comprehend my original comment. The 7zip program circa 1997 was not the GUI one that now exists. I direct you back to my original comment where I explained everything.

Re: One of those programs cast a long shadow

Seems you skimmed my post too quickly. pkzip was mentioned twice.

Your skepticsm motivated me to dive into my archives. Not only did I find some of Igor's old programs, but the FTP site referenced in the README is still up and running!

ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/

His 777 archiver is: ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/777004b1.zip

His BIX archiver is: ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/bix100b7.zip

His UFA archiver is: ftp://ftp.elf.stuba.sk/pub/pc/pack/ufa004b1.zip

If you look at readme.txt in any of those, in the "OTHER PRODUCTS" section you'll find mentions of 7-zip as a "Console 32 bit" archiver.

Looks like he started these all around 1997, a couple years before he reused the 7-zip name for the graphical Windows 7-zip program he wrote. The timestamp in the zip files are circa 2000, which is after the GUI version of 7zip existed, but (fortunately for me) the old README.txt in them just wasn't updated as new versions of the archivers were released.

Unfortunately I don't see anything that looks like the original command-line 7zip archiver in my brief perusal of that FTP site. Perhaps removed to prevent name confusion.

One of those programs cast a long shadow

Back in the mid 90s I would often browse "MS-DOS" program download sites, including Tucows. Most often I was interested in trying out the various command-line compression utilities. Back then, getting a useful amount of data to fit on a floppy disk was a challenge, so some alternative compression utility that squeezed a few more percent out was very welcome. I distinctly remember needing a pack of about 20 floppy disks to install Quake, for instance.

There was of course a selection of compression formats, ARJ, CAB, RAR, and more, but overwhelmingly they were 3rd party implementations of PKWare's ZIP format, often claiming better compression than pkzip. Among these ZIP-compatible challengers, I found one program going by the moniker of 7 zip, written by some Russian guy.

While it didn't actually compress noticeably better on any of my test files, it still stood-out for coming with a detailed technical write-up of what algorithms the author used, and what types of data it compressed better than other utilities.

In the late nineties I was surprised to hear people talking about that obscure little 7 zip program, and looked it up again to find it had become a Windows GUI application with multiple format support. Later, Igor's own LZMA compression format got a lot of buzz and proliferated. Today, LZMA is the compression format used behind the scenes in just about every software installer/package.

The killing of CentOS Linux: 'The CentOS board doesn't get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do'

Re: So?

Because there were no Engineers working on CentOS

That's fine, but it's disingenuous to then claim: "they don't interact with us." when the primary way users *would* interact with upstream is getting no attention/support/etc.

now you can submit patches against Stream

Yes, the theory is that this will be more valuable to RHEL, but that remains to be proven. Red Hat already has much of that from Fedora, so it's not certain at all they will be very interested / responsive. Until recently, the theory was that Red Hat knew CentOS provided a lot of value...

If there's a problem with a fresh RHEL package, users who hit the bugs have a support contract and will see it quickly fixed by the source. With Streams, that "no SLA" issue might leave you in a very bad state for a long time.

Re: So?

These are people who, the CentOS team said, "never called, never write, they don't interact with us."

Ever tried filed a CentOS bug report? Every one has been sitting open for several years with no sign any other human has ever seen it.

Google's Alphabet sticks a pin in its Loon internet broadband service

Re: Starlink

if you're trying to get broadband to the world's poorest billion people, doesn't matter how cheap you make the kit if your propspective 'customers' can barely buy food. From a commercial sense it would only work if government-sponsored.

That's equally true of Starlink and Loon, so we're back to just plain price comparisons.

I previously looked-up weather balloon launches and found costs of around 1mil with endurance of 1mo. Even with the project able to get one to survive for 10 months, and presumably lowering the launch costs, we're still talking thousands of dollars per day in operating costs, for a mediocre data connection.

Bye bye, said Trump admin to Huawei: You give a cheque-ie to our techies, but there's no licence to ply

Re: Sabotage can come from either side

China has already moved into several African nations, providing new roads, schools, hospitals at no cost to the local government

China isn't giving away infrastructure to Africa, except for a few token projects or one-off politically motivated concessions. Instead those projects are payed for by LOANS the poor governments are required to repay:

China's lending to countries in Africa was $152 billion between 2000 and 2018, according to the South China Morning Post, much of which was spent on Belt and Road Initiative projects. It's become known as "debt-trap diplomacy", where a country loans money with the intention of political or economic concessions if the loan cannot be repaid.

https://www.newsweek.com/china-africa-loans-coronavirus-economy-u-s-debt-trap-diplomacy-1540883

Re: Sabotage can come from either side

Soon they may cut the supply of raw materials that the US needs for its technologies

What might those be? China imports many raw materials, including from the US.

Rare earths have been a concern for some time, but there are contingency plans in place. Besides, if they continue to export partially-finished products including those resources, or continue to export to manufacturing and exporting countries like Japan, Germany, Mexico, etc.,, that would work just as well for the US.

Debian 'Bullseye' enters final phase before release as team debates whether it will be last to work on i386 architecture

Re: Debian Bullseye 32 bit

Most Intel/AMD 32 bit only hardware is ten or eleven years old in 2021

Why is that an issue? I've run servers much older than that. You want some 32-bit systems? I'll ship you a pallet of PCs... (more likely I would find someone on eBay selling the same, closer to you to reduce shipping cost).

32-bit systems can address 4GB or RAM and PAE allows multiples of that, so we're not talking low-end systems that are only used for retro-computing. I still occasionally use an EeePC netbook that's got a 32-bit x86 CPU.

I see 32-bit mostly on the likes of VMs with low amounts of RAM. Being 32-bit reduces the memory usage significantly.

Flash in the pan: Raspberry Pi OS is the latest platform to carve out vulnerable tech

Re: I went big

Can't believe no-one has posted this yet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg

Backers of Planet Computers' Astro Slide 5G phone furious after shock specs downgrade

Re: Peak Planet

a slim discrete keyboard that works with a range of phones from various vendors is probably the better option.

It might be... if the keyboard attached to your phone securely (there are a few models of phone cases with slider keyboard built-in), and it had some unobtrusive way to draw power from the phone instead of having to hassle with charging two sets of batteries. But manufacturers haven't shown any interest in doing that, either.

If you're just got a bluetooth keyboard, you either won't keep it charged or always take it with you, and so it will be useless when you need it.

Linux developers get ready to wield the secateurs against elderly microprocessors

Re: what is linux good for?

(Try constructing two sentences which differ only by the case of one or more letters and which have different meanings.)

Easily done wherever proper names, initialisms, or similar also happen to be dictionary words.

Loser Trump is no longer useful to Twitter, entire account deleted over fears he'll whip up more mayhem

Re: An elephant in the room

> He wants desperately to nuke Iran.

His only objection to Iran is that they made a deal with Obama. Trump had an easy path to escalate hostilities to all-out-war with Iran when they retaliated for Solemani's assassination, but instead he signaled his cowardice and lied to the US public claiming no US soldiers were injured to defuse the situation instead.

Deloitte's Autonomy auditor 'lost objectivity' when looking at Brit software firm's disputed books, says regulator

such an order of magnitude of profit, whilst I wouldn't argue is impossible, is, however, very unlikely.

Such profits are very unlikely in the hardware world. They are easy in the software world. Autonomy claimed to be selling only software, when they were not.

they've probably shelled out more a month on redundancy payments.

See my example again for how a small amount of money can completely change the profit picture.

You don't see it?

What if I say I build houses for $100 000 and and sell them for $1 million each?

And then it comes out that my costs are actually $800 000 each? That's only lying about a few tens of millions of $$$ across a few dozen houses that were built. The difference in profit potential of my company, however, is dramatic.

Not that I want to defend HP, here... it was up to them to investigate before being parted from their money.

3G ain’t totally dead yet: Verizon pushes back cut-off plans to some unspecified future date

I guess Verizon's in more of a rush than most to kill 3G as theirs is based on a quite proprietary Qualcomm CDMA-2000 technology [...] 2G GSM and 3G UMTS can be typically supported on more flexible modern RAN infrastructure

That doesn't seem to be the case. AT&T dropped their 2G network in 2017, and announced 3G will be shuttered at the end of this year (2021), necessitating VoLTE. T-Mobile has allowed its 2G network to linger on, while 3G will be killed off this month.

And now for something completely different: A lightweight, fast browser that won't slurp your data

Re: Not Free

Having a button which allows a user to collapse or expand a region means that the page can have lots of things on it without requiring the user to scroll past irrelevant things, but HTML itself doesn't do that

A link to an anchor (way down the page) would do just about what you want, and much more quickly than the javascript version.

JS could also be used to keep a page updated even when data changed at the remote server without making the user refresh the page all the time

A simple meta refresh would update the page without user intervention. But my strong preference is to leave my page the hell alone... When I see one of my tabs reloading every few seconds in the background, I close it and don't go back.

There are few, very, very, very few cases where javascript helps make a webpage more useful, and infinite other examples where is makes life a nightmare. Mobile sites collapsing the page contents, then forcing users to click a READ MORE button is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.

I use the "JavaScript Toggle On and Off" extension, and I immediate blacklist any site that does anything irritating. It's amazing how many sites work much, much better with javascript disabled. I just haven't quite made the jump to disabling javascript by default, and whitelisting only a few.

Red Hat defends its CentOS decision, claims Stream version can cover '95% of current user workloads'

Self-inflicted injury

RHEL needs CentOS more than CentOS needs RHEL. If you're paying attention you'll see that EPEL is largely empty for major new RHEL releases until AFTER the first CentOS release of same, even if that's many months later. A large community is contributing to CentOS, not RHEL, but RHEL gets the benefits, too.

I'll admit that CentOS was in need of some changes. Anybody here every reported bugs? You'll NEVER get a response from anyone. Even if that improves, it's still not acceptable to make CentOS the beta (or even RC) testing grounds for RHEL. If there's a bug in a RHEL update, the customers have a RHEL support contract. CentOS users do not.

What does IBM think is even the alternative? That companies are all going to pay for full priced RHEL licenses for every little test system? That companies will be happy to run production systems on bleeding-edge Fedora? IBM better just hope that RockyLinux and CloudLinux work out, because otherwise this move will be the start of a major decline in RHEL's fortunes, as IBM tries and fails to milk the corpse.

SUSE isn't much better, and Ubuntu does some very nasty things. If the new RHEL rebuilds don't pan out, I'll be heading to Debian.

AMD, Arm, non-Intel servers soar as overall market stalls

Some companies are growing in a big way during this crisis. Most others are struggling. Overall, the economy is way down, so it is no surprise the server market didn't grow.

My guess is that it just happens that the most agile companies which are able to grow right now despite the well known challenges, also happen to be the most agile about their hardware vendors as well, and willing to switch, increase density, etc. Other companies may be looking to save money, as well.

Seagate says it's designed two of its own RISC-V CPU cores – and they'll do more than just control storage drives

Who cares about shipments?

it shipped about a billion CPU cores last year in its storage products, this development may signal a coming surge in RISC-V processor shipments

And does that matter to anyone? The fabs likely don't care the architecture. If it's a fairly a small number of designs, it doesn't even suggest a large number of RISC-V jobs in the job market, either.

In that ARM license you're paying for the patents they've taken out over the years, as well. You've got to be careful not to implement something ARM patented in your RISC-V chip or you'll really pay for it.

Arecibo Observatory brings forward 'controlled demolition' plans by collapsing all by itself

Re: Moichandising!

needless to say the dome was never built to withstand high tonnage of parts falling down from a great height

Strange that, because it is shaped like a massive meteor impact crater...

HPE to move HQ from Silicon Valley to Texas, says Lone Star State is 'attractive' for recruitment, retaining staff

Re: National popular vote is a terrible idea

Let's leave aside the "politicians will only visit big cities and only address big city problems" because that's where the easiest to reach voters are concern.

The current situation is that presidential candidates utterly ignore all non-swing states, and heap obscene amounts of attention on a few swing states and even specific counties and cities, which is infinitely worse.

Alaska and Wyoming might as well not exist as distinct states as far as their say in a popular vote presidential election.

Quite the contrary. Alaska and Wyoming don't matter because they're not swing states. If they were, their combined 6 votes could swing a close election.

the one behind will want recounts in a LOT of states

If the loser feels like paying for a large number of recounts, have at it.

The likelihood of a close election is drastically reduced with a nation-wide popular vote.

Re: Texans are gonna love this

The population of the US is moving south and west. Northern states like WI, MI and PA will continue to decline in importance. California, Texas, etc., continue growing and will have larger shares of the National vote.

Several states have a National Popular Vote law on the books. One big state, or a few small ones ratifying the law, and the Electoral College will be moot:

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

Laggardly HPE kisses Joe Biden's ring, whispers Uncle Sam's IT in dire need of modernisation

Re: tech will have hat in hand for uncle joe

Write dead-tree letters if you care, politicians pay no attention to email.

Ever since the anthrax attacks in 2001, even physical letters are just scanned-in an viewed electronically by all major politicians (their assistants, actually).

Re: Clever move

Yese, howe coulde anyonee possiblye makee thate mistakee? Obviouslye addinge onee extrae lettere changese thee whole meaninge.