Posts by rcxb 1019 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Boeing's lack of willingness to properly re-engineer the plane as it would be too costly
Actually it was American Airlines back in 2011 that required Boeing supply 100 re-engined 737s that didn't yet exist, which largely forced Boeing's to develop it. AA required the same model largely due to FAA pilot certification requirements.
“Not only have [Airbus] sold jets to American, but they have forced Boeing’s hand into pushing for a re-engined 737,” said Saj Ahmad, an analyst at FBE Aerospace in London.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/business/global/american-places-record-order-with-2-jet-makers.html
went on to detail the numerous problems faced by those seeking to live on [Mars] or even attempt
Perhaps we can round-up some volunteers from Australian prisons and give them the option of transportation to Mars.
Might even be seen as a slight improvement over their homeland, as there are no deadly native animals out there, and the Kiwis aren't invited.
With one little twitch of my thumb, I can send the cursor all the way across multiple monitors with a thumb trackball. You'd need to really contort your finger to try that with a poorly designed trackball, and I would have to slide a mouse straight out the window. Now try doing that for hours on end...
With your thumb, it's the same simple motion as cleaning a pair of glasses. Ever seen somebody use their index fingers for jobs like that?
does not a DMCA request refer to actual alleged "pirated" copyrighted material (music, etc), rather than the means to obtain same?
No, it can be either.
The content take-down notices are part of the "Safe Harbor" provision of the DMCA. That was written to prevent service providers from being liable for illegal content uploaded by their customers, provided they take it down immediate upon receipt of a takedown notice.
In youtube-dl's case, it's the "Anti-circumvention" provision. That was written primarily to make illegal the sale of satellite and cable TV descramblers (e.g. softcams).
The RIAA used strained logic to claim Youtube's minor obfuscation to hide the video location counts as copy protection and that reverse engineering it is therefore illegal.
The URLs in the unit tests are only *proof* that it's intended to be used for illegal purposes. Note that an individual downloading any of those videos in question is not illegal. Redistribution after the fact would be.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
