Posts by rcxb

Cloudflare outage caused by techie pulling out the wrong cables

Re: Cables with labels on

Absolutely! Painted my chain-link fence that way. Only took a few hundred cans.

Re: Cables with labels on

Ran into that at a previous job, One day a slightly different rack with slightly different wire management made the longest run slightly longer than the longest cable of the proper color we had on-hand. Had a black cable in my bag that would do, and wouldn't clash with the scheme and appear to belong elsewhere. But how to label it? After much thought I printed out a handful of labels which said "I AM GREEN" and attached them to various positions. Others who came upon the mismatched situation would inspect the oddity, find the label and (after a few moments of careful consideration) the quizzical look on their faces gave way to a sudden bolt of clarity.

IBM age discrimination lawsuit suddenly ends, suggests Big Blue was willing to pay to avoid discovery process

Re: (IN)Justice has prevailed!

It was cheaper than fighting (theoretically the lose pays the costs ... but if the loser has little money he will declare bankruptcy and we end up paying our legal costs anyway)

You might want to understand the concept of moral hazards. Yes, it's cheaper to settle one case than to fight it. However, you are incentivizing such invalid lawsuits, and guaranteeing more to come. If you'd fought it, you'd lose more money, but so would the other side, and others (lawyers, really) would think twice about filing weak lawsuits against you.

See Newegg's stance on (patent troll) lawsuits:

https://www.newegg.com/insider/newegg-vs-patent-trolls-when-we-win-you-win/

AMD takes another crack at Intel's server stronghold with more Epyc silicon

Re: Sorry AMD fans...

A shrewd move would be to stick An FC or infiniband controller onto the server board by default.

Seems like practically all server-class network cards in the past decade have been CNAs, so I don't see a lot of benefit there.

Server product lines often (but not always) have a longer life than any given network standard, anyhow, so while the 1st gen version of a server released now might be 10GbE or 40GbE, the 2nd gen version in a few years might come with 40GbE or 100GbE (still CNAs) in the base model instead.

Second-wave dotcom Uber-investor Softbank forecasts gargantuan losses as world economy faces slump

Re: Business models

Uber's underpaid employees are a symptom of weak government regulations, while their success has brought the issue to public attention and caused wide-spread changes for the better in some locations.

Besides, if you choose not to do business with every company whose employees don't like working for, you'll quickly find yourself out of options. I suppose everything is relative... Uber is bad until a company comes along that treats employees worse. Walmart vs Amazon, who is exploiting their employees the worst?

Re: Business models

I know plenty of people who hate taxis, but love Uber.

Sure, taxi companies could have adopted new technology and beaten Uber to the punch, but they didn't. Being able to see in real-time how far-off an available taxi is, up-front pricing of the trip, etc., was enough of an innovation that we're talking about Uber and Lyft...

Just as GPS device makers weren't the ones that brought GPS to ubiquitousness with cheap smart phone apps, the taxi companies were caught napping as well. No doubt there were ice delivery drivers complaining that mechanical refrigeration is nothing new or innovative, newspaper publishers deriding radio news broadcasts as nothing special... etc.

Linux fans thrown a bone in one Windows 10 build while Peppa Pig may fly if another is ready in time for this year

Re: explorer.exe from the Linux command line.

Since when did Linux fans care about Windows or Unix / Linux subsystems on them?

Ever since the first time they were asked to help with a Windows box, and would REALLY have preferred to use their familiar tools to get things done instead of the god-awful Windows UI...

I'd sure be happier if open source backup tools worked flawlessly on Windows systems (though NOT just Windows 10 systems), and if it was easier to use Linux GUI apps on Windows to gradually wean Windows users off the burning platform entirely.

Re: Linux developers

I understand that there are a couple of vm (including the best from Sun) but I was told that they are not as good as VMWare.

Virtualbox conveniently breaks every time you upgrade your Linux system.

KVM is quite nice, however. While not entirely dumb-user-friendly to set-up (switching your Linux system to br0 bridged networking and perhaps changing the disk image path), works quite nicely with a minimum of issue.

Microsoft attempts to up its Teams game with new features while locked-down folk flock to rival Zoom... warts and all

Re: All those billions spent in Skype

I don't think AOL is a Microsoft rival anymore either... Didn't cost them billions to make that one happen.

And other rivals just pop right up all the time, don't they?

Re: All those billions spent in Skype

Ah but Skype for Business is Windows-only, no Linux. Typical.

Commit to Android codebase suggests Google may strong-arm phone makers into using 'seamless' partitioned updates

Re: And how long will Google maintain/update versions ?

Life is perilous on the trailing edge, too. Your old Android version is vulnerable to a number of exploits, should anyone care enough to target you. And how about older SSL protocols being blocked by newer web-sites and apps that require data? Or newer app version dropping support for your old phone?

All that said, I keep a lot of old Android phones limping along, too. Can usually find some specific purpose for them... be it WiFi surveillance camera, digital music players for home or car, movie or game mini-tablets for kids on long trips, barcode scanners, etc. All with either no connectivity or minimal sensitive data, of course.

Time to brush up on current affairs. Because we're predicting Li-ion batt lifetimes using impedance and AI

There's nothing necessarily AI about this at all. AI seems to be a buzzword for just any computer algorithm at this point.

Cisco rations VPNs for staff as strain of 100,000+ home workers hits its network

no other vendor can come close to matching their performance per $.

Open Source VPN software on an old server running Linux is nearly zero cost... Be it OpenVPN, WireGuard, OpenConnect/ocserv, isakmp, etc. Easily beats everything else on performance/$$$ metrics.

Internet Archive opens National Emergency Library with unlimited lending of 1.4m books for stuck-at-home netizens amid virus pandemic

This completely undermines copyright.

Did you know there are buildings you can walk into, in practically every major city, where you can look through copyrighted works at no cost? You can even take them home for days or weeks at a time at no charge. Publishers absolutely hate those places. I've heard them called "libraries".

Re: WTF is that shit?

I never found it anything more than just an annoyance

Those looking for service manuals for old, small single-engine aircraft have quite a different opinion on the subject of copyright restrictions on abandoned works.

And there's a whole spectrum of people in-between those two extremes.

Leaving Las Vegas... for good? IT industry conference circuit won't look the same on other side of COVID-19 pandemic

Since your staff don't need t o be in the office all the time, they won't be and suddenly you don't need 15% of your in-office seats.

Except you still need to have all that office space when everyone does show up once in a while, whatever the occasion.

upgrade ability (in 15 years, I can count on one hand the number of desktops that have been upgraded - if someone needs more, they get a new machine).

Do you throw out the desktops when a monitor stops working? Or a keyboard? How much time does it take your IT department to swap one of those, exactly?

so when the office is shut due to power problems, nae problem, everyone gets a day off?

I'm sure companies like Amazon will be very happy to hear all their warehouse workers can go home and get their work done on company laptops when one of their warehouses loses power.

Re: I disagree

Human emotions aside, the ongoing Economic effects from this global shutdown will take decades to dissipate

It's just as likely once we get to the end of this pandemic the pent-up consumer demand will lead to a huge upsurge in the economy, quickly recovering all value lost during the recession. It's possible consumer buying habits will change for the better for years to come after such a wake-up call.

Why the heck did we buy loads of desktop PCs? They are now all sat in offices gathering dust whilst we scramble around to buy loads of laptops.

You'll find Laptop hardware has a great deal of extra cost both up-front and in maintenance. Compare replacing a damaged keyboard on each. Compare installing whole-drive encryption and tracking (CompTrace) onto laptops, which you don't need with desktops. Compare the cost of all new laptops for your whole company come upgrade time, versus desktops, where you can reuse old monitors and peripherals.

If you need it, you spend the time and money on Laptops, of course. If you don't strictly need it, giving out Chromebooks and letting employees RDP into their desktops can be cheaper, more secure, and retain all the benefits of desktops (low cost, better security, better ergonomics, better performance, etc.)

Delivery drones: Where are they when we really need them?

Re: "Futurist predict"

poles have a longer life than pumps, require little to no maintenance, and are cheap and easy to replace

There are plenty of areas where poles do NOT have a long life... some areas are dense with trees have frequent ice storms that bring down utilities lines and poles, etc. They're quite difficult to replace after such storms as well, due to dangerous icy driving conditions, many roads blocked by snow, downed trees, etc.

Re: "Futurist predict"

Direct burial is an unfortunate half-step that ends up costing more money in the log-run. Taking the next step to utility tunnels resolves all those issues, and offers many more advantages.

Drones are successfully delivering blood to hospitals across Rwanda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnoUBfLxZz0

Grsecurity maker finally coughs up $300k to foot open-source pioneer Bruce Perens' legal bill in row over GPL

Re: So, let me get this straight

Most professions aren’t entitled to claim their professional opinions are first amendment protected if they are wrong.

Bruce Perens is not a lawyer. He is not a professional on contract law. He has no training or credentials that would lead anyone to believe he is an expert on the subject. His opinions were not expressed in a report he was paid to produce for a client, but instead a comment he posted on his own blog.

I'm sure you're trying to make some point about something, but whatever it is, it has nothing to do with the current topic.

Microsoft staff giggle beneath the weight of a 52,000-person Reply-All email storm

Re: Bcc FTW!

That's actually slightly useful.

If you get no answers at all, Amazon will hide your question. Bad answers will make the question show up on the product page, where others may come along and give a proper answer.

Now... those who give a 4-star review with a rambling response about why they got it, and how they've given it to someone else and have no idea if it works... They should be removed from the gene pool.

Re: This yor folt

Hard to call it stealing when there is no possible way for you to give over your money for it.

What happens when the maintainer of a JS library downloaded 26m times a week goes to prison for killing someone with a motorbike? Core-js just found out

Re: No updates for 18 months? MONTHS?????

You can blame yourself for depending on so many undocumented behaviours, edge cases, etc. I bet most Reg readers hate those javascript-heavy sites which depend on pixel-perfect page layout to work at all. My browser is not your graphical toolkit. I'm looking for information, not ever-changing interface paradigms to keep re-learning.

Forget about those pesky closures, Windows 10 has an important message for you

Re: The long, dark teatime of the next few months

No it doesn't. I've spent a lot of time on dairy farms. Just try to make cheese out of your UHT and let me know how that goes.

Re: The long, dark teatime of the next few months

I've tried UHT. It bears absolutely no resemblance to milk.

Re: The long, dark teatime of the next few months

Low shelf-life? On the shelf, milk doesn't even last for a day... In the refrigerator, you might get a week out of it. In the freezer, though, mlk will be just fine for months. Can't say I've tried keeping it for years at a time, personally. Just give it 3 days in the refrigerator to thaw out, and a good shake to ensure it stays homogenized.

COVID-19 not blamed for tech outage: We were just being a bit crap, says TeamViewer

99.9% uptime? What's that, about 3.5 days of downtime per year? And I bet that 0.1% doesn't fall on weekend and holidays, either.

Analyst calls it: This is the 'biggest fall ever in the history of the worldwide smartphone market'

Re: Apple cart upset?

iPhones are apparently the opposite of milk... I could previously buy more than two of those, but no longer.

Netflix starts 30-day video data diet at EU's request to ensure network availability during coronavirus crisis

Advertisments are negotiated on long-term contracts, so the advertisements won't change, and broadcasters won't be coming up short for quite a while.

There is always somebody else that wants to advertise, if the price is right and they've got a large, possibly captive audience to reach... Right now it might be companies selling online services, Coca-Cola, takeaway restaurants, etc. Anybody that's still operating and isn't over-capacity / out-of-stock on their merchandise.

Firefox to burn FTP out of its browser, starting slowly in version 77 due in April

Re: "FTP is an insecure protocol and there are no reasons to prefer it over HTTPS"

Bolting GOOD encryption, integrity and authentication onto FTP is extremely difficult due to the design of the protocol. You have multiple channels, multiple modes, bidirectional connection establishment, and so much more.

Why would anybody put the effort into bolting, when SFTP and HTTPS both exist, and both can do the same job, if desired.

Amazon launches itself into retail IT with 'all the necessary technologies'. Not saying which, but you know...

Re: Madness

Step 3: Amazon's tech doesn't work out all that well, so the wrong customers get billed from your store, they get angry at you, then you're out customers, product, and cash.

Chips that pass in the night: How risky is RISC-V to Arm, Intel and the others? Very

Re: The trade war changed everything

You're talking about domestic consumption... I'm talking about China's export market. Huawei doesn't want to just own the Chinese market... that part is easy enough. What they (and the government) want is the world. There their products have to be good enough to be able to compete with non-embargoed competitors.

Intel and AMD don't just have a duopoly on "x86"... what they have is the whole high-end computing segment. (POWER is negligible).

If someone puts together a RISC-V chip with some incredibly useful functionality... Intel and AMD will stick it in the design of their next processors, too. x86es didn't have FPUs, now they do. Add in MMX, 3d now, SIMD, sse2, and all the other fun stuff you'll find from grep -m1 ^flags /proc/cpuinfo ... That's why Intel and AMD have remained relevant, as other architectures fell by the wayside.

Other posters have already mentioned Intel and AMD benefit greatly from a standard architecture as well, which is seriously hindering ARM's growth, and that's the *advantage* that's going to help RISC-V? Not likely.

And x86 has competition... If AMD went away, Intel would crank up prices and slow down their R&D spends. THEN they might be in a position to be disrupted by the next big thing.

Re: The trade war changed everything

China went all-in with MIPS years ago. That didn't get them far. I could make a list of all the similar Chinese tech initiatives that never went anywhere... They are big, but not big enough to overcome economies of scale and focused R&D of the entire rest of the world.

An open architecture won't save them, either. Somebody needs to fab the chips, and Taiwan isn't guaranteed to remain on friendly terms. China can't keep-up on fabs, so they'll have to burn an awful lot of money just to stay a couple die shrinks behind the rest of the world and at a constant competitive disadvantage.

I'm sure they'll do it, if it actually comes to it rather than be entirely cut-off, but doing so would put them at several additional disadvantages to western technology companies. Really, China is just using it as another big bluff to get better terms in the negotiations, as they've done several times before. China want to scare western businesses into continuing to sell them the rope needed for their own future noose...

Former US Homeland Security Inspector General accused of stealing govt code and trying to resell it to... the US govt

Re: Govt Employees are honorable and patriotic.

a two-party monopoly that is bent on destroying it's other half regardless the cost to all of us.

Don't worry... The US will be a one-party system soon enough.

More than a billion hopelessly vulnerable Android gizmos in the wild that no longer receive security updates – research

Re: I used to have an Android phone

If you'd spent the same amount of money on a flagship Android phone you are spending on an iPhone, you'd get updates for years, as well.

But yes, Android has many low-end options, where Apple does not. Some people absolutely HATE having choices and flexibility, and for them, there's Apple.

Re: And in comparison...

There is no large software eco-system with plenty of opensource choice

So you've never heard of F-Droid?

https://f-droid.org/

Re: And in comparison...

My phone is running KitKat, it's rooted with a firewall & privacy manager.

How's that going to help when you get an MMS message with Stagefright exploit blasted at you?

Your smug sense of superiority isn't any protection.

Let's Encrypt? Let's revoke 3 million HTTPS certificates on Wednesday, more like: Check code loop blunder strikes

The rules for CAA makes it essential to check at the time of issuance, not before or after or just whenever you get around to it. Specifically they require the check to happen no more than 8 hours before you issue the certificate.

That's a flimsy argument. You can't model a practical threat where I want to allow LE to issues certs for my domain today, but I didn't yesterday, and so the cert issued yesterday (which also validated domain control and the like) is dangerous. The other case is infinitely more risky.

a much smaller list of names for which if the check is run today it fails

Exactly! Those small number are the ONLY ones that should be revoked. Maybe they were valid when issued, or maybe not, but there you actually have a high risk that the bug caused something untoward to occur. The rest are meh.

Why the mass revocation? Doesn't sound like anything bad happened. The checks just weren't up to snuff. So LE should go back and re-check the domains that were issued certs to see which, if any, should not have been issued from them, and only revoke those few. The certs will all be gone in a couple months anyhow.

Raspberry Pi goes 2GB for the price of 1GB in honour of mini-computer's eighth birthday

Re: Better options

You can buy a USB card with GPIO ports for all of £2.

Give as many GPIO pins as you want to any old PC.

Better options

Why get a $35 Pi, then spend on a case, power supply, disk, USB hub, etc., when you could just get an Atom mini-PC that includes all those, outperforms an Arm CPU, has dual-video outputs, and is compatible with any software you could possibly want?

£110 for a 4GB (+64GB SSD) version:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fanless-X7-E3950/dp/B07Z94W8CJ/

2GB minumum

Linux isn't too happy on 2GB these days, thanks to web browsers... Firefox says 2GB is the MINIMUM for their 64-bit version, but if you stick with the 32-bit version, that drops to just 512MB. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/73.0.1/system-requirements/

Chrome and Opera kindly fail to mention how much memory their monstrosities will consume.

If it's Goodenough for me, it's Goodenough for you: Canuck utility biz goes all in on solid-state glass battery boffinry

Re: Still a problem though

To charge an EV battery fully in just minutes would require a cable the size of a fire hose

Tesla Supercharger cables are nowhere near the size of a fire-hose. Doubling or quadrupling them still won't incrase them to the size of a fire-hose... Closer to a garden-hose, really.

And that's the naive way to go. Assemble your batteries into higher-voltage packs, and you could double charging time with ZERO increase in the size of conductors. As typical charging times today are already under an hour, doubling the voltage and doubling the current would get you charging times of 15 minutes or so.

Another option is to shorten the charging cables... Design your parking spots to better align the vehicle charging receptacle with the charging station, and you can significantly reduce the charging cable length. Half the length means half the resistance. There's no reason to limit EV charging stations to the same designs as legacy fuel stations.

'I give fusion power a higher chance of succeeding than quantum computing' says the R in the RSA crypto-algorithm

Re: Glib rejoinder

I'm not sure that qualifies as "interesting" there - just the Trolley Problem with a different backdrop.

It isn't. The AC's description is simply lacking.

The crux of the Outer Limit's episode is that someone discovered building a city-destroying bomb is inexpensive and technically simple. It is inevitable that others will make the same discovery, the knowledge will get out, and every psychopath out there will soon have as many nukes as they feel like making.

Wi-Fi of more than a billion PCs, phones, gadgets can be snooped on. But you're using HTTPS, SSH, VPNs... right?

Re: "MitM attacks on unencrypted network traffic do happen"

will my non broadcasting router still accept the spew despite being hidden

It's not "hidden" it's just not "advertising." That means your WiFi isn't broadcasting out its name every few seconds, when otherwise doing nothing. Whenever there's any traffic on your WiFi at all, the SSID is being sent out on every one of those packets, and is trivial to find. Disabling advertisements does nothing but make things harder for the already-inept.

Just go install WiFi Analyzer on your mobile to see all the "hidden" devices in your area.

Pope tells his followers to log off for Lent

Re: My alternative

For years I've been looking for a good set of earplugs that can be slept in (comforably). Haven't found good ones yet. Even those advertised as such are no better than bog-standard foam plugs.