Posts by rcxb

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses... but not your H-1B geeks, L-1 staffers nor J-1 students

Re: H-1B visas [ ... ] Silicon Valley to fill engineering departments with top international talent

Silicon Valley has been abusing the H-1B visa program for far too long, with enthusiastic Democratic [ neo-liberal economics ] support.

Can't imagine why you're singling-out Democrats. Republicans love the program, too. GWBush was in there between Clinton and Obama, and did nothing to fix/eliminate the program.

Trump is doing something NOT because he's Republican (he isn't, really) but because it just happens to appeal to his extremely right-wing xenophobic base. Hard to cheer for that. And his one-off executive orders will only temporarily change things, and get rolled-back completely as soon as he's replaced. An actual fix would be to have congress vote to end the program, but that won't happen. because it's popular with the corporate donors behind congressional representitives in both parties.

We were already secure enough for mass remote working before COVID-19, boast IT pros

Three-quarters claim pandemic didn't trigger big changes to corporate security settings

While the other 99% are too busy struggling to keep their systems secure to be arsed to complete a survey...

Hey is trying a new take on email – but maker complains of 'outrageous' demands after Apple rejects iOS app

Not very smart

Apple will not allow the iOS client into its app store unless the maker pays Cupertino "15-30 per cent of our revenue."

So spin-off a subsidiary which earns very little money and publishes a cheap/free app. The app only happens to be compatible with the more expensive paid service from another company by a similar name, if you change a setting in the app. It works well enough to sheild Apple from paying taxes, so...

Or maybe offer in-app purchases with a 100% mark-up. People who know better will go to the website and buy the service at a discount. People who have no sense will pay both you and Apple for their cluelessness.

Hey requires a dedicated app, rather than working with any email client, and users pay a subscription of $99 per year. "That makes our business work without having to sell your data, advertise to you, or otherwise engage in unscrupulous marketing tactics," its makers claim.

You can find a plain vanilla email service with no advertising and a strong privacy policy for far less than $99. ProtonMail comes to mind, and is less than half the price.

Splunk to junk masters and slaves once a committee figures out replacements

Re: When STONITH falls

Any "word" will, at some stage, have multiple meanings in which some may be offended

Perhaps a less offensive choice for Master/Slave would be Grand Wizard and Clansmen.

I prefer Parent and Children, because it nicely implies that Master / Slave relationship, along with a nice little illegal forced child labor angle. Child processes can be launched with a goForkYourself() call.

Terms like Director and Employee are useful to indicate which processes sit around just passing messages, and which ones actually do productive work.

EU aviation wonks give all-electric training aeroplane the green light – but noob pilots only have 50 mins before they have to land it

Re: Reserve power?

So that's about ten times the "fuel" weight, for two-thirds of the range; you'd need roughly 15 times the fuel weight to get the same range [*].

"Fuel weight" is another ridiculous, unfair measurement. That fuel needs an engine, transmission, fuel tanks, pumps, hoses, firewall, radiator, fans, and more supporting equipment. An electric motor is a featherweight in comparison. That's why curb weight is a vastly better number to go by.

Re: Reserve power?

Batteries have nowhere near the energy density of gasoline much less fuel oils.

Lithium-Air batteries have a theoretical specific power of 11.4 kW/kg, compared to the theoretical maximum of 11.99 kWh/kg for Jet A-1, so very close.

We don't have theoretical batteries, you may say, but that's fine, because we don't have theoretical engines with 100% conversion efficiency for jet fuel, either. And if we did, they wouldn't be zero mass and zero volume, so would negatively affect those numbers. And that's without mentioning that jet fuel needs things like storage tanks, pumps, which also add mass and volume.

Your argument sounded less foolish years ago, before electric vehicles like the Teslas came along and proved it's possible to get the same range with batteries as with gasoline for only modestly more weight. Battery technology is not static, manufacturers continue to increase energy densities. In time, they absolutely will become competitive, it's just a gradual process.

Mortal wombat: 4 generations of women fight for their lives against murderous marsupial

Wearing pyjamas?

She rushed out to meet the monster still wearing pyjamas.

I can't say I've ever seen a wombat wearing pajamas before. El Reg really buried the lead on this one.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: Never understood this

There actually would seem to be a use case for an internet connected refrigerator with a temperature gauge and internet alerts if the temperature goes out of range.

I don't see why anyone would want that as PART of their refrigerator, as opposed to a £20 stand-alone universal temperature monitor component that only just happens to be commonly used with refrigerators, but was perhaps designed for a humidor, e.g. ASIN: B07L4QNZVF.

Re: Never understood this

I've replaced the fans, thermostats and the relays on several refrigerators, keeping them running for decades longer. Go with solid state (except for the fan of course) and it'll just keep running forever.

I'm with California on this one... Don't trust consumers to dissect refrigerantion systems, particularly now that highly flammable coolants like propane are popular (due to their higher efficiency and low greenhouse/ozone impact potential).

Re: Never understood this

My cat is large white and really doesn't like strangers.

Doubly so when they intend to drink all his milk...

Better smart devices

It always seems strange that the devices which DON'T benefit from more monitoring are the ones most likely to get the "smart" treatment, while the devices that would greatly benefit, never do.

Why can't I find a "smart" animal trap? It would really help to know immediately when it has been tripped and whether or not something is inside. You can manually mount a battery-powered WiFi camera to it, and wire up a sensor to the door, but it's so strange nobody provides such a thing.

Trump's Make Space Great Again video pulled after former 'naut says: Nope

Re: That's a cheap-ass looking hat he's hawking.

Not at all. What would give you that idea?

https://www.keepbusy.net/pics/pic-dump-241-20.jpg

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

the seven hour number crunching task can be reduced to 0.41s, or 60,000x faster than the original Python code.

Yes, but how many hours of programmer time did it take to do the optimization, and how much money does a few hours of a programmer's time cost versus a few hours of a single CPU core?

I'm all for simple and efficient programming, but processors are rather ridiculously fast now. The only thing I concern myself with performance wise is why my web browser takes so damn long to load what should be a simple Amazon product page, with it's delayed loading of tons of javascript that happens AFTER I've started typing into the search box messing things up, and not knowing when it's actually finished.

Longer-term, I'm sure chipmakers aren't going to just give up. Quantum computers are in the works, much has been said of optical, shortening pipeline or increasing L1 cache helps, and there's potential for exotic layouts like 3D multi-layer chips to give a speed boost as well. With many billions to be made, there won't be a shortage of R&D when we actually hit the wall.

California emits fine-print of its GDPR-ish digital privacy law, complete with Google and Facebook-sized holes

The CCPA is quite useful already, though not for the intended purpose.

Magazine subscriptions are practically free because most of the money comes from advertising and selling of your contact info to 3rd parties. Now with the "do not sell" option you can sign-up for a periodical and immediately tell them not to sell you onto the "sucker lists" that result in floods of commercial mailings, and worse.

Even better, with the "delete my info" option, any unwanted company who has contacted you by whatever means can be told to knock it off, and legally must purge you from their system. Particularly useful in the event of other people mystyping their contact information as yours. Trying to correct such errors was previously a Sisyphean farce from the 7th circle.

Not very helpful while you have an account with a service like Google/Facebook/etc, but excellent the moment you decide to delete it, and wish for everything they know about you to be purged and forgotten.

Lenovo certifies all desktop and mobile workstations for Linux – and will even upstream driver updates

Re: Hats off to Lenovo

Refurbished Thinkpads and Thinkcentres are one of the most wonderful and reliable pieces of hardware I ever had the honor to lay my hands on.

Funny, because the old Lenovo ThinkCentre M58p's we bought a truck-load of were some of the WORST we've ever had the displeasure of supporting and made us swear off Lenovo entirely.

I had to help with a funny issue on one of the few survivors just the other day... With the SFF version. you have to pivot the drive bays out of the way to access the RAM slots. And how long are the SATA cables Lenovo used? Just a bit SHORTER than the distance they need to span when you do that... So take a working Lenovo ThinkCentre SFF system, upgrade the RAM, power-up to find it takes MINUTES to get through the BIOS boot-up. After all that, it doesn't find the hard drive anymore.

I commend Lenovo for widespread Linux support, and maybe we'll buy some ThinkPads as a result, but only rarely do we need proper "Workstations"... If they would support Linux across their entire desktop PC line, now THAT would be damn convenient (not having to check hardware compatibility). As it is, we've had far better experience with Dell PCs.

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

But the 80-character limit also arose when home computers arrived and the TV was hijacked as a cheap monitor.

Except early computers that connected to TVs used much lower text resolutions.

VIC20 was 22-column. ZX80 was 32-column. Getting 80 column displays required a lot of expensive upgrades to those. And when you did, 80-columns would look quite bad over RF output. SCART of course looks nice, but I'd say most went to dedicated VGA monitors.

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

if the Max is allowed to fly again its lower operating costs may be welcome.

I understand the bulk of those lower operating costs is lower fuel consumption, while fuel is quite cheap right now.

Of course that won't be the case in the long-term, but it seems like the already delivered 737MAX planes would be sufficient to handle the lower public demand for quite some time, if they were allowed to fly.

I guess Boeing is getting cheap enough loans that it will still be profitable to build jets now, and warehouse them for years until anybody wants one at anything like normal price.

Embrace and kill? AppGet dev claims Microsoft reeled him in with talk of help and a job – then released remarkably similar package manager

Re: Microsoft jus' gonna be Microsoft

A more modern example would be Citrix's MultiWin/MetaFrame, which became RDP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Desktop_Protocol#Version_4.0

Windows Terminal hits the big 1.0: Fit for production?

Re: A terminal program?

Unix has only been around for 50 years now, and it certainly didn't have any terminal emulators at the time. Initial release of XTerm was 1984, 36 years ago. OpenVMS dates from 1977, 42 years ago.

Facebook to surround all of Africa in optical fibre and tinfoil

Re: Why don't they join the ends?

Brits sure do like their ring circuits, don't they?

Re: Can someone explain?

Material resistivity σ (S/m) at 20 °C

Silver 1.59×10^−8

Copper 1.68×10^−8

Gold 2.44×10^−8

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

Re: With 500MW

You're correct, but you can still use that "low grade heat" to at least pre-heat the incoming working fluid (water) for a power plant or similar. Would be perfect if you needed to melt snow on a massive scale.

You overstepped and infringed British sovereignty, Court of Appeal tells US in software companies' copyright battle

Re: US Law applies worldwide

And are those fines based on the income of just the "child companies"?

Re: US Law applies worldwide

US Law applies worldwide in the eyes of Lawyers and Judges in the USA.

It certainly applies to those businesses that maintain a presence in the US. And the EU does the same, quite happy to fine US companies for not following EU regs.

'We're changing shift, and no one can log on!' It was at this moment our hero knew server-lugging chap had screwed up

Britishisms

The office, he recalled, was an open-plan space the size of four football (or "soccer", if you will) pitches.

No point in translating football to soccer for US audiences, while in the same sentence using a complete British-ism like "pitches".

Penny smart and dollar stupid: IT jobs slashed in US, UK, Europe to cut costs – just when we need staff the most

Did any of the DR plans you drew up or contributed to contain any consideration of the circumstances we are currently in; I suspect not, as I know despite all my years of experience, none of my Business Continuity plans covered the current situation.

Our DR plans most certainly considered several scenarios where nobody would be allowed into the offices and everyone would have to work remotely for extended periods. The current circumstances are far less devastating than most DR scenarios.

"such a high proportion of companies are allowing employees to share confidential company data on personal devices, using outdated apps as well as knowingly operating in breach of GDPR rules."

For companies that weren't prepared (most of them?) it's a matter of doing ANYTHING necessary to continue business operations immediately, or else having to close up shop entirely and everyone finding new jobs. Given that, risking a GDPR fine doesn't seem a bad choice...

Of course they've put themselves in this position by not having working DR plans, and not having enough IT staff to do things properly, etc. But right now, companies everywhere are breaking all kinds of rules to varying degrees, and just hoping their luck holds out and the fallout won't be completely devestating. Look no further than COURTS using Zoom...

Airbus and Rolls-Royce hit eject on hybrid-electric airliner testbed after E-Fan X project fails to get off the ground

Re: Electric planes?

Aircraft are routinely flown empty to reposition for route changes

Very difficult to fly a plane with zero fuel.

I suspect you have no idea what your talking about.

I'm the one supplying numbers and linking info. What you're accusing me of actually applies to everyone else but.

Re: Electric planes?

A 787 is 120 tonnes empty, and can carry 180 tonnes of fuel.

That may be true, but it's useless (and impossible) to fly an empty aircraft. Throw in the crew, passengers, baggage, or other cargo, and the fuel isn't such a large percentage. Plus, a significant fraction of the fuel is maintained as reserve capacity, which would be much less necessary without the vagaries of liquid fuels.

See: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Takeoff_weight_diagram.svg

Re: Electric planes?

Buit that wasn't the question.

The "answer" was just before the part you quoted...

"Li-Ion batteries do maintain a very, very flat power curve until they are deeply discharged,"

You don't get less energy from your petrol when the tank is 10% full than when it's 90% full

Actually you do, though really quite minor at that scale.

Re: Electric planes?

As far as I can see jet fuel retains the power supply characteristics until the tanks are dry.

That's completely wrong. As fuel level goes down, you're spending more energy pumping it to the engines, dealing with vapor, and running risks of stalls due to the fuel not being over the pump inlet while the jet is turning, and there are dangers of inaccurate fuel gauges, etc.

Battery-electric vehicles are vastly superior on that front. Li-Ion batteries do maintain a very, very flat power curve until they are deeply discharged, and engineers prevent deep discharge to extend battery life, anyhow. At the low discharge rates used in vehicles, they are extremely consistent and predictable. I would NEVER consider driving my petrol car down to 5% of a tank of fuel, but with a battery electric car, it's quite safe to do and not uncommon.

Re: Electric planes?

But they're still there for the whole flight, unlike the liquid fuel that burns off during the journey.

Much of the fuel burns off, but the engines, storage tanks, pumps, etc., do not. Jet fuel can be as low as 20% of the overall weight. And the weight is of most concern at take-off, where both types of planes would be fully loaded in any case. This single effect you're focusing on is really just a footnote, for a theoretical jet that doesn't exist with as-yet unknown technology.

Re: Electric planes?

A: being able to keep the diesel engine running at the most efficient speed whilst moving the train at a range of velocities

No. Locomotives don't have a huge bank of batteries. The engine has to throttle up and down as power needs vary, as it would with a mechanical transmission. Although in the case of multiple locomotives you can turn some of the engines on and off as needed to try and improve fuel efficiency to a small degree.

B: regenerative braking: there's a lot of energy in a moving train

No. Again, diesel electric trains do not have a huge bank of batteries to dump that energy into. Regenerative braking only works for electrical grid-connected electric trains, while it's a benefit there, it has nothing to do with why trains became diesel electic.

Re: Electric planes?

Electric batteries are about fifty times the mass of airline fuel for a given amount of energy.

This is a nonsense comparison. Lithium-Air batteries have a theoretical specific power of 11.4 kW/kg, compared to the theoretical maximum of 11.99 kWh/kg for Jet A-1, so very close.

We don't have those theoretical Lithium-Air batteries, you may say, but that's fine, because we don't have theoretical engines with 100% conversion efficiency for jet fuel, either. And if we did, they wouldn't be zero mass and zero volume, so would negatively affect those numbers. And that's without mentioning that jet fuel needs things like storage tanks, pumps, which also add mass and volume.

The only realistic way to reduce airline fossil fuel consumption at the moment is to fly a lot less.

Actually, a large number of options to reduce fuel consumption exist. Flying wing designs improve performance by 1/3rd, lower air-speeds propelled by turbo-props instead of turbofans are more fuel efficient, just flying slightly at slightly lower throttle (which some airlines have already done) reduces fuel usage at the expense of slightly longer flight times.

SpaceX's Elon Musk high on success after counting '420' Starlinks in orbit and Frosty the Starship survives cryo test

Re: When will Starlink become operational?

Get them a proper directional antenna, and mount it on a pole as high up as practical. Avoid obstructions (trees) directly between it and the direction of the cellular signal.

Work from home surge may work in Wi-Fi 6's favour, reckons analyst house

Re: another Pink Elephant

The best solution in a crowded radio environment is still: move to the 5GHz band

Which is exactly what an upgrade gives you. From 802.11ac onward, 5GHz band support is required, and your devices will choose to use the 5GHz WiFi signal whenever available, and 2.4GHz only when necessary. Of course if you are able to shut of the 2.4GHz band on your router entirely, good on ya!

Re: another Pink Elephant

This is frankly PR to sell their kit which will make little difference to people on 100Mbps broadband and none to people on 20 Mbps or less Broadband.

Not at all. Go 15m from your WiFi router, and you'll see speeds drop below 20Mbps... Much lower with older tech. The newer kit will keep speeds higher as the reception conditions deteriorate.

Billionaires showered with wealth as experts say global economy set for long and deep recession

Re: whenever governments grab MORE control...

As the Chinese government has grown in power over the recent decades, many of the poor have moved up to middle-class. As power in the UK moved to Parliament and away from the King and aristocracy, the political power and weath of commoners drastically increased.

Go back to the "Gilded Age" to see what a weak government means... "Robber Barons" monopolizing entire segments of the economy, easily able to prevent others from entering those markets, and holding state-like control.

You know what helps the lower and middle-class? Unions. And Unions only work when the government has enough power to stop private corporations from firing anyone and everyone who votes to unionize. Much like Wal-Mart immediately shutting down any stores where it looks like employees might vote to Unionize.

Cisco UCS servers slugged by 'This SSD will self-destruct in 40,000 hours' firmware farrago

WD again... they'll lose market share bigtime...

It was actually SanDisk, before WD purchased them.

I doubt WD is worried. They've got no effective competition in the spinning hard drive market (60% market share), and the enterprise SSD market is a 3-way race between WD, Samsung and Intel at this point. WD has long since managed to buy-out their competitors, like HGST and SanDisk.

The rumor that just won't die: Apple to keep Intel at Arm's length in 2021 with launch of 'A14-powered laptops'

Arm-based chips also have several key advantages, particularly on the power efficiency

ARM looks good only in apples-to-oranges comparisons. Extremely low performance ARM CPUs have very low power usage, but the higher performance ones use more power than an Intel Atom or some mobile ULV CPUs. Those touting the low power and high performance of ARM CPUs are either lying or are themselves falling for the lies of interested parties, and sadly propagating them.

There isn't a single ARM core out there which comes anywhere close to the performance of a single modern x86 core. Either Apple will have to wait for that to change, or they will have to force all developers of MacOS apps to continually maintain fat binaries for two architectures indefinitely, or Apple will just have to surrender the high performance PC market entirely, which won't make graphical designers and video editors very happy.

If Apple was smart, they'd only consider releasing an ARM laptop as an iPad-with-keyboard type device running IOS. Call it an iClam... That would avoid the risk of hamstringing their MacOS business in the process.

Web pages a little too style over substance? Behold the Windows 98 CSS file

Re: Bring back win98 UI

Actually, NT4.0's UI and overall design was much better than 2000, but not as many people were exposed to that one.

New York Attorney General probes Charter over claims it forced staff to work in offices amid coronavirus pandemic

Re: COVID-2020

Yes, working remotely eliminates some of the costs of running an office building. However, it also eliminates the time and cost of people traveling to and from the office as well, and that is a huge savings for most people, as well as quality-of-life improvement.

SAP decides one head is better than two in a crisis, parts ways with co-CEO Jennifer Morgan

Re: It is simpler than that

You'd prefer to have a nice female CEO in charge, eh?

How about:

Meg Whitman

Ginni Rometty

Elizabeth Holmes

Carly Fiorina

Marissa Mayer

Heather Bresch

Just a few off the top of my head, mind you.

IBM == Insecure Business Machines: No-auth remote root exec exploit in Data Risk Manager drops after Big Blue snubs bug report

Re: And thus is why hackers profit...

Crime is always more profitable in the short-term, but tends to be a bad career choice over the long-term. Until very recently, NOBODY paid bug bounties, and It's still debatable whether they are making things safer or not.

Ask yourself why blood and organ donations don't net the donor a nice big check.

There are always two sides to every story – except this one, which is just a big billboard borked in all directions

BSOD have almost exclusively caused by hardware faults since Windows 7.

You cant be serious!

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update (KB4517389) causes 'Blue Screen of Death' system crashes.

yet again with the Windows 10 update that is causing some computers to crash down while others are experiencing the "Blue Screen Of Death" (BSOD). This latest Windows 10 update known as KB4540673

cumulative update KB4532695 is causing blue screen of death—or BSOD critical errors.

The infamous BSOD is also hitting users with KB4535996 installed with the blue screen appearing as Windows loads the login screen.

Windows update KB4343900 causes blue screen of death

I could do this all day...

Academics: We hate to ask, but could governments kindly refrain from building giant data-slurping, contact-tracing coronavirus monsters?

Re: Location, location, location

there is a reason that I keep BT switched off.

Oh, that was YOU? Would you mind turning BT back on, lots of people would like to get their internet service back.

British telecom (BT) customers are facing an issue with cable and internet services, and it is not working for many of the customers. One of the renowned outage tracking websites also confirms the same.

As nice as Pai: FCC chairman comes out in favour of Ligado Networks' 5G proposal, despite criticism from airlines and military

"it is time for the FCC to make a decision and bring this proceeding to a close," wrote Pai

The FCC did make a decision... Back in 2012. The answer was: NO

NASA makes May 27 its US independence day from Russian rockets: America's back in the astronaut business after nearly nine years

The Demo-2 launch also represents a major milestone for SpaceX: It will be the company's first crewed mission since the firm's founding in 2002.

This is a much bigger deal that any of that. This is the first time any non nation-state has put people into orbit, ever.

A paper clip, a spool of phone wire and a recalcitrant RS-232 line: Going MacGyver in the wonderful world of hotel IT

Come with us to the 1980s, when computers cost proper money

The ZX81 kit debuted in early 1981 at £50 (about £200 in 2020).