Posts by rcxb 932 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
It's not enough that we get very little feedback from touching on-screen buttons on a smooth, flat screen... now we have to make sure you get NO FEEDBACK AT ALL by making you flap your hand around in empty air!
On the plus side... fewer fingerprints on your display.
Why with the dual-screens? Just make it a keyboard. Plenty of people out there waiting for the next Android slider to show up.
Took years but it had to happen... They ran out of early adopters, high-end database loads, and folks who bought the hype about what a huge speed-up they'd get from SSDs and would throw money at them. Now they have to actually provide vaule for money, and it's not worth an insane premium next to spinning disks.
Smart phones are only commodities now, because they're all chasing the same corner of the market. Give me a phone with a good hand-hold instead of flat back, and I'll run out to try one and see if they actually did good. Come out with a new landscape slider, and you'll have many people lined-up to get one.
"you could modify the firmware of your hard drive to zap all the data on the disk if a particular block was ever accessed."
SMART self-tests by the drive controller and automatic read-ahead in the SATA controller would be likely to trigger that trap, too. Not to mention OS, disk utilities, or the BIOS/UEFI probing the disk and just getting lucky once in a while.
Serial-over-lan works perfectly to access the BIOS with any decent server. I do it on a regular basis, back to those 2950s. Plus ipmi allows you to change several settings from the command-line without entering the BIOS.
Windows has had serial-over-lan support since 2003. Microsoft calls it "Emergency Management Services". It's enough to get your booting or networking issue sorted out, then you switch over to RDP, remote MMC, or whatever.
"iDRAC allows access to a virtual KVM and other features which is difficult to emulate in a telnet shell..."
Anything newer than a PowerEdge 2850 has IPMI Serial-Over-Lan support that works far better than a virtual KVM. Text only, fully standards compliant, no browser interface needed. Comes with all those features found in your DRAC web UI and more. Just once check-mark to enabled it on Dell servers.
There were twin-engine jets from both Boeing and Airbus flying trans-Atlantic, and the ETOPS rules went into effect in 1985, years before the very first steps in A380 development. The future direction of air travel was out there for any well-informed individuals in the industry to see.
What's with the dig at millennials? You know they're just shy of middle-age now, right? Seems reporters think "millennial" perpetually means early-20s young adults. In fact there's never been a more clearly delineated generation, with the date right in the name. Might as well call out those no-good young whipper-snapper GenX'ers.
Forbidden areas: Go back a few years, and mainframe printers in particular were big open dangerous things that looked like newspaper printing presses. They were behind locked doors, with a window you'd go up to, ring a bell, and stand around for possibly quite a while waiting for someone to come over and hand off your stack of wood-pulp. Relevant to this case, the people who were in the locked room and able to hand over your stack at any given time, weren't always one of the few trained to replace consumables, so wait times could be lengthy.
Unknown location: It's fairly common to have a couple printers in a rotation, and sometimes many more than that. With a dozen printers on two or three tables, it's easy to spot the one that has papers in the output tray. It may be less easy to find the one out of a dozen that has an alert icon on the LCD, or a sometimes dim red LED somewhere on it. Doubly so if several of those printers are substantially different models that have the alerts in different locations and in different forms.
I am fully sympathetic to lowly users being dumb and helpless. I am less sympathetic when the supervisors/managers of the groups are similarly slow witted, unable to remember or follow instructions, and unable to filter the dumb, helpless and repetitive requests from their users before wasting the IT dept's time on such trivialities.
You won't find many drives that can sustain more than 1Gbps, even sequentially, definitely not random reads/writes. You'll only see that briefly to/from cache. Besides, SAS and SATA are higher speed in part so they can be shared across several drives. Ethernet switches give everybody the full 1Gbps. And let's not get into overhead. USB3 claims 5Gbps, but is actually a bottleneck to drives than can't sustain 1Gbps.
I may be able to shine a little light in the darkness... I e-mailed security@amazon.com a week ago because I got a spammy e-mail specifically offering money to write product reviews on Amazon This is to an e-mail address I only give out to family and retailers I similarly trust with my credit card data.
It's not the first time I've gotten targeted emails that seem to know I'm a highly rated reviewer on Amazon, but this time they failed to use the BCC field and supplied me with a list of dozens of e-mail addresses that clearly look valid. Not remotely sequential, not dictionary words stuck together, not brute-forcing all random combos, etc. Clearly a list of personal e-mail addresses.
I requested they check the list of addresses against their user database to confirm or disprove my strong suspicion that their website is somehow being coaxed into leaking private customer e-mail addresses. Then came the Amazon e-mail early this morning...
Purely speculating now, I wonder if this is related to the phenomenon of lots of new merchant accounts popping up on Amazon, which claim to have millions of items at absurdly low prices, then either send a tracking number for unrelated packages (to stall for time) or else don't even bother pretending they have ever shipped anything. In either case they're playing a numbers game, waiting until their feedback and refund rate is bad enough that Amazon blacklists them, but in the mean time collecting angry e-mails forwarded through Amazon's e-mail proxying system of people asking where their items have gone.
Linux has long had pretty much everything you say it doesn't:
Live OS upgrades: KSplice has been around for a decade.
Inline memory compression: Compcache / zram has been around for a decade, also.
Hypervisor overcommit memory: KVM has had over-commit for at least a decade, Xen even longer. VMware longer still.
ASO/DSO (automatically tune the operating system: Linux systems need vastly less (if any) tuning of parameters, compared to traditional crufty Unix systems.
Workload Partitions: Linux has rather advanced containers in OpenVZ/LXC/Xen for over a decade.
Suspend / Resume: KVM/LXC/etc. suspend / resume just fine.
"IBM sold off the x86 hardware business to Lenovo and the Apple/Microsoft partnerships are not interested in alternatives to OSX and Windows."
Hmm,.. I recall Dell occasionally steps into the fray with Linux developer laptops and Windows-free desktops. Dell isn't as much of a direct competitor to IBM as others like HP, Oracle, etc, so a partnership where Dell boxes get shipped with IBM logos at a marked-up price to big IBM shops might work.
Copyright is one of the issues both sides agree on. Hollywood is a major contributor to Democrats who doesn't want to see that well dry up, and lots of other business interests make money from longer and stricter copyright, so the Republicans are on-board too. The lack of opposition is why copyright has been extended practically indefinitely, despite that being blatantly unconstitutional. Robbing the public domain while giving nothing back has been highly profitable for Disney and many other mega media corporations.
"So, HOW BIG does that mirror need to be?"
They say 8 times as bright as the moon. Moonlight is under 1 lux, so call it 8 lux. Full sunlight is around 100,000 lux. So you need a surface area of around 8/100,000ths the area of the city you intend to illuminate. If I did my quick maths right, You need a reflector of 48x48ft for every square mile of city you wish to illuminate.
- "Why not an ACTUAL jumper(s) on motherboards to enable diagnostic modes, management engines, BIOS/EFI updates etc? You should need physical access, more than USB or other socket on outside and NEVER default access by software without a HW jumper enabling it."
I'm not going to pay data-center staff to go around swapping jumpers on hundreds of servers every time we want to update the firmware, then put them all back again. That goes double if we want to do the firmware update in the middle of the night when load is low.
You can make your OS as lightweight as you want, but if you want to browse modern web pages, Firefox / Chrome / etc are going to chew up at least a couple GB of RAM on their own, and make you sorry you tried it, if you have less. I only wish there was a lightweight browser out there which could render modern web. Now THAT would be a huge productivity boost for everyone.
(1) That's just ignorant. Encryption is math, and mathematical proofs are absolutely fundamental, untouchable by any technological progress. It only just happens that the currently popular factoring systems of public key encryption ala RSA are potentially vulnerable to quantum computers. There are a number of alternative, existing methods of public key exchange which are absolutely invulnerable to quantum computers. There's even a full Wikipedia page just on the subject of "Post-quantum_cryptography".
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