Posts by rcxb

Florida jury throws huge fine at Tesla in Autopilot crash

Re: Flawed technology

End of the article it says the driver had his foot on the accelerator, so we're not even talking about cruise control (adaptive or otherwise).

Re: Flawed technology

are there roads with a 70mph speed limit that end abruptly at a STOP sign?

Many interstate freeway off-ramps in the US meet that description.

You are expected to slow down, of course. In urban areas there may be a speed limit sign part-way down the off-ramp indicating a reduced maximum speed, but that extra signage is uncommon in low-traffic areas outside of major cities.

For an example I just looked up, try I-40's Fort Rock Rd off-ramp in Arizona.

Flock storage: Audio boffin encodes data in a starling

Better idea

Wouldn't it be more useful to train them to say: Alexa. Order a Rolex. Confirm.

Then release them in London on a warm day...

Backup tool Rescuezilla resurrects itself across six Ubuntus

Good tips on multi-boot USB

Pretty good tips on bootable USB rescue systems there...

Ventoy makes it easy for anyone to get going. In the the old days, installing grub or syslinux, copying the boot files from each ISO into a folder, and writing a menu was a challenge.

SystemRescue and HBCD are the best options for repairing Linux and Windows systems.

However, I don't see any use for GParted live... Just boot-up SystemRescue, run "startx" then click the gparted icon and use it there.

I would add the netboot.xyz ISO to Ventoy for up-to-date (mainly Linux) OS installs and any other live/repair system you might need and not have locally.

I would also suggest Clonezilla live. I've been following Rescuezilla's progress with great interest, but have found Clonezilla to be more reliable.

Also, to write a clone image to your USB stick with either one, you need to either set "VTOY_LINUX_REMOUNT" with older Ventoy versions, or follow the newer procedure to be able to write the image to the USB stick: https://ventoy.net/en/doc_linux_remount.html

RANT:

It seems strange to me that partclone / partimage are still the best options, despite their limitations like inability to resize partitions, and the difficulty of extracting individual files. Ghost was more advanced than that in the 90s. FSArchiver has been around for a long time now but doesn't get used in Clonezilla for the minor detail of being unsuited to pipeline the data (e.g. through compression utils). Instead of a custom tool like FSArchiver, all you really need is to mount & tar the contents of each partition, and then just save (and restore) a little bit of disk/partition information. If Clonezilla/Rescuezilla put together a nice UI around that, not only would they be better tools... backup software like AMANDA / Bacula / BackupPC / Borg could leverage that scheme and offer easy, quick bare-metal restores as an option. Instead, today people restore from Clonezilla images, THEN do a restore from the latest backup using whichever software package. For just a small bit of concerted effort, the open source world really lags far behind the proprietary options here.

You have a fake North Korean IT worker problem – here's how to stop it

Fraudulent employees interviewing for Ghost jobs

Gotta hire a security company to ensure your HR department doesn't interview fake employees to fill your fake "ghost jobs".

Re: Easier solution

There's no excuse except incompetence for not spending what is, compared to the salary, a trivial sum bringing the person in for an in-person interview,

What's to stop the Norks from hiring an actor with a hidden earpiece from acting as a stand-in for the face-to-face portion?

How many remote workers are going to get robbed or kidnapped by flying to a foreign country to interview with what turns out to be a fraudulent company?

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un essay question.

an ordinary IT worker totally unaffiliated with the North Korean state, but who merely happens to be from North Korea and is simply trying to find a way to make a living

Ordinary North Korean citizens don't have any internet access. Only a select few have any access.

North Korea is a real communist state (not to be confused with China).

Firefox is fine. The people running it are not

Re: They understand...

"Long?" There are 5 posts, estimate it takes 6 minutes to read the whole thing, but the information relevant to this discussion is right at the top.

This thread you're commenting on is discussing Mozilla browser vs Firefox performance... You should expect contemporary content.

Re: They understand...

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/my-mozilla-vs-my-firebird-vs-aebrahims-fb-builds-vs-official-firebird-nightly.1173442/post-9244853

I'm sure I'm not the only one looking for a simple straightforward browser, that isn't intrusive, and without all the idiot bells and whistles

https://dillo-browser.github.io/

https://www.netsurf-browser.org/

It's those "bells and whistles" that keep a browser modern. Even if you don't, *somebody* wants those webGL extensions and won't stay on a browser that doesn't have them... and that number will slowly climb. Many other features follow the same path, as well as UI changes. The vast majority come and go, but you never know which ones that will be.

Re: They understand...

it took far too long for them to accept that the bulky and awkward Mozilla browser was dead and that the lighter and more elegant Firefox was what people actually wanted

Firefox was never actually any faster than the Mozilla suite (now Seamonkey). It was strange marketing hype that was never reflected in benchmarks.

Chrome got that same hype, while it was never actually faster than Firefox.

Hegseth signs flying memo to expand military use of cheap drones in oddball video

The US military has pretty much ignored small hobby-size drones and laughed off their use as weapons.

No, the US military has been developing RF jammers and EMF weapons (like "THOR") to take down small drones for years before Russia's full invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2017/06/15/air-force-buys-100-dronebuster-devices-for-security-forces/

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/06/21/air-forces-thor-microwave-weapon-instantly-ends-enemy-drone-attack-new-video.html

British Perl guru Matt Trout dead at 42

No mention of a cause?

Something a bit fishy here...

Cold without the compressor: Boffins build better ice box

Re: Room temperature?

Poor guys, they must sweat a lot during the summer

What? 27C is far below body temperature. You're just poorly dressed if you aren't comfortable at those temperatures. In fact it is just a hair warmer than normal comfortable summer time office temperatures (23-25C).

Wayback gives X11 desktops a fighting chance in a Wayland world

DEI context

Again the reg is posting that DEI quote seeming intentionally out of context...

The VERY NEXT sentence is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

By all means, read it for yourself and see if it's some racist tirade its made out to be:

https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Junior sysadmin’s first lines of code set off alarms. His next lot crashed the company

Re: and that's why they moved me to where I could do less harm

These problems sounds quite a bit different than a prior story you posted with a similar outcome:

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/04/08/who_me/#c_4840709

Are these in-fact different incidents, and you just had a talent for taking down VSE production systems over and over?

VMware must support crucial Dutch govt agency as it migrates off the platform, judge rules

Re: Money for nothing...

All people choosing closed source commercial software are taking the risk that their supplier might do this, or might just discontinue the product or go bankrupt and stop supporting it.

At least if you're purchased the closed-source software, you can keep using it under the original (perpetual) license without support and updates until you sort something out.

But with "cloud" services, or a software "subscription," the moment you decide not to renew at the exorbitant increased price, your business-critical services stops working, and you probably lose all your data too.

Techie exposed giant tax grab, maybe made government change the rules

Wait a minute - the tax payer is responsible for building a stadium for the local sporting team, who are themselves a profit making enterprise?

Yes, sports teams threaten to move to a larger market if their smaller market doesn't cover the cost of building a newer stadium.

The reason they want a newer stadium isn't that the old one is about to be condemned or anything, just that league rules limit prices on normal tickets, but give free reign to charge crazy prices on private "skyboxes". So they demand a new stadium with a lot more and fancier skyboxes to ensure plenty of profit.

In the past, there were plenty of cities who bought the sales pitch and would go along with it, but in the past 1-2 decades many have become wise that the projected benefits for the city never pans out and have had few takers (like happened with the Olympics).

That's how you end up with three different NFL teams planning to move to Los Angeles in the same year... A market which for decades prior had zero.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160105202607/https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/25438233/chargers-raiders-and-rams-file-for-relocation-to-los-angeles

Windows 95 testing almost stalled due to cash register overflow

Re: petrol pumps

whilst petrol(eum) is a liquid, not a gas.

Let's not pretend "petrol" makes any more sense than "gas". Putting petroleum (crude oil) in your fuel tank will ruin your day. And petrol at usual temperatures does put off a lot of vapours.

Forked-off Xlibre tells Wayland display protocol to DEI in a fire

Re: Code talks

A pure capitalistic society would be truly awful.

SAVE THE LOWER-CASE LETTERS!

Re: Code talks

It seems like the DEI quote was perhap poorly worded, and is being taken out of context here. The *very next sentence* is: "Anybody who's treating others nicely is welcomed."

Ukraine strikes Russian bomber-maker with hack attack

The only way the B1 is superior to the B52 is in price.

top-speed (a LOT)

maximum payload

operational ceiling

per-hour flight costs

Re: Washing Machines no longer spinning

Now you're just making a complete fool of yourself, insisting on commenting when clearly you couldn't be bothered to actually read the article you're complaining about, first.

US still flies B52s from Vietnam war ...

That's quite different than being "unable to field a wholly new non Soviet aircraft design". The US has the B-1B, which is superior to the B-52 in every way. I think they only keep using the B-52 because they have such a huge inventory of them, thanks to crazy cold-war spending. They have retrofit B-52s to modern avionics and engines, so it's mostly just an old airframe.

There's little reason to spend all the money to replace them instead of just using them. After all, the 747 is nearly as old, and it is similarly still in service.

Re: Washing Machines no longer spinning

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erictegler/2023/01/20/is-russia-really-buying-home-appliances-to-harvest-computer-chips-for-ukraine-bound-weapons-systems/

Major US space firsts:

* First communications satellite

* First satellite to transmit television images

* First reusable piloted spacecraft

* First successful Mars flyby

* First communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit

* First communications satellite in geostationary orbit

* First satellite-based search and rescue system

* First rendezvous of manned spacecraft

* First return to Earth after orbiting the Moon

* First spacecraft to orbit Mars

* First spacecraft sent on escape trajectory away from the Sun

* First mission to enter the asteroid belt and leave inner Solar System

* First Jupiter flyby

* First Mercury flyby

* First Saturn flyby

* First Neptune flyby

the USSR beat America in the space race in every detail except landing on the Moon

I've beat Usain Bolt in every 100m race I've run. He probably would have done better if he was present...

The USA had plenty of space firsts, but the USSR firsts made for great Red Scare propaganda:

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

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Li+ batteries

I was trying to keep it simple, but pedantically it needs a few caveats.

You could have opened with "Most fires" instead of "Any fire". That would have only required 2 more letters, and would not have made your statement technically incorrect. Or maybe even just drop the "Any".

Re: Li+ batteries

Any fire requires fuel, oxygen and heat to start

Florine fires don't require oxygen.

Hypergolic fuels don't need any heat source to ignite.

Just ship EVs with the batteries discharged

Should be very easy to work-around. Just ship EVs from the factory with their batteries mostly discharged to greatly reduce incidents such as these.

Judge puts two-week pause on Trump's mass government layoffs

Just because it is an "executive branch" department doesn't mean the President has absolutely power and control, or that the Congress has none. That has NEVER been the case:

Congress has broad constitutional authority to establish and shape the federal bureaucracy. Congress may use its Article I lawmaking powers to create federal agencies and offices within those agencies, design agencies’ basic structures and operations, and prescribe, subject to certain constitutional limitations, how those holding agency offices are appointed and removed. Congress also may enumerate the powers, duties, and functions to be exercised by agencies, as well as directly counteract, through later legislation, certain agency actions implementing delegated authority.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45442

Re: And when the government ignore the ruling ...

The President needs the Judiciary. If 5 members of the Supreme Court announced tomorrow that (in retaliation for Trump failing to honor their judgements) they will find against the Trump Administration on every single issue, the Justice Department wouldn't be able to accomplish anything. The states would be able to kick out or completely neuter the FBI, INS, Border Patrol, etc. agents trying to operate within their borders.

While the employees are part of the executive branch, the money to pay their salaries was all approved by Congress. And the heads of the departments require Congressional approval as well. The President never had total carte blanche authority to just go do anything he wants to do with those departments, even though they are technically part of the executive branch and he does have the authority to supervise and direct their efforts.

AMD is Ryzen to the SMB occasion with a bundle of baby Epycs

Brand dilution

AMD should have come up with some 3rd model name... falling in-between EPYC and Ryzen. This is just diluting the EPYC brand and bringing it down a notch. Data centers can SAY they've got EPYC CPUs, while they really have cheaper Ryzens. That doesn't help anybody.

I don't really see the appeal. It's just a desktop chip with an EPYC label slapped on it. Maybe the supported motherboards for these chips will be more reliable and ALL have ECC support as mandatory, instead of a guessing-game on desktop mobo models? Other than that, a cheap cash-in on the EPYC name seems to tbe the only reason for it.

Google details plans for 1 MW IT racks exploiting electric vehicle supply chain

Re: "Leveraging"

"Leverage" isn't a verb

Merriam-Webster says it is a transitive verb:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/leverage

Re: Fun stuff

The cooling system will probably end up as a serious hazard in itself.

This info was at the end of the article. They've been operating for years already:

"Project Deschutes, features redundant pump and heat exchanger units for greater reliability, and that this has allowed it to achieve a CDU availability of 99.999 percent since 2020."

Liz Warren, Trump admin agree on something: Army should have right to repair

Re: Politicians lack of grip with reality

Right to repair is all very well, but the question of equivalence of parts and operation is important.

Right to repair isn't about using cheap parts... It's about ensuring a device (e.g. your Ford Focus) can be repaired AT ALL,

What if Ford wouldn't sell your mechanic replacement parts at all? What if replacing an exhaust pipe triggers some check that prevents your vehicle from operating at all, after? Hell, imagine if that was the case with your brake-pads. And if it was against the law to figure out how to get the replacement parts to work properly. That's about what you get with Apple and John Deer in the US at present.

The U.S. Military has about the strictest standards you could imagine. The cans of silly string they purchase are expensive "MIL-SPEC" certified units. There's no reason to believe they will cut corners and purchase parts that are cheap and don't meet-or-exceed manufacturer specs.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un?

flying somebody out costs a few grand at most

Isn't that how most human trafficking works these days? Pretend to be a legit company, fly somebody out for a phony job, then kidnap them?

Dentists sue ex-contractor for holding web domains hostage in biz fight

Re: It's either in a contract or it's not

Apparently not bothering to do any of the work is not in itself a breach of contract, and neither is theft

What you (obviously) *meant* the contract to say, might not be what it actually said. That's why wording in legal documents seems so awkward. And why people pay so much for a lawyer's time to write-up such contracts... to ensure there is no legal ambiguity one party can wriggle through and claim they were not obliged to (employee) do a non-trivial amount of work or (employer) submit payment after.

I can only come up with 3 possible meanings for "pedo"**:

* Relating to children

* Relating to soil

* Relating to flatulence

I can't see a dentist wanting to be associated with any of those three.

** I'm discounting words that happen to concat "ped" then an "o"-word (like "pedometer") because tacking just the "o" onto the "ped" is completely arbitrary and meaningless (i.e. what does "feet O" mean to you?), just as abbreviating torpedo as "pedo" would be.

Fog ransomware channels Musk with demands for work recaps or a trillion bucks

the billionaire's growing frustration with political attacks from the left.

That's a strange way to write: Billionaires harassing and firing low-paid civil servants, aggressively cutting government services, and publicly displaying Nazi salutes, is bad PR that is causing a massive decline in sales for Tesla.

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor in an utterly obscure way

Broadcom, like VMWare/Dell/EMC before it, makes it very difficult to find the free download. I strongly recommend saving the link:

https://support.broadcom.com/group/ecx/productdownloads?subfamily=VMware%20vSphere%20Hypervisor&freeDownloads=true

Arm reckons it'll own 50% of the datacenter by year's end

Re: Maybe, but not this year

They compile the software on their machines before pushing to PROD in DCs/Cloud.

What!? They don't have test and QA servers? What kind of an tiny IT department are we talking about where the development, testing, and QA is all just done on one dev's laptop, then pushed direct to production?

they need to at least have a big presence in desktop.

I've never seen an IBM z mainframe laptop...

IBM US cuts may run deeper than feared ‒ and the jobs are heading to India

Re: Why is anyone surprised?

Install an Indian into the C suite, and all the jobs under him will be in India pretty quickly

Are you referring to Google, Microsoft, Micron, YouTube, Adobe, NetApp, or Palo Alto?

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: Really, really old news

I meant it the other way around... Keyboards no longer have PS/2 backwards compatibility included, and haven't for more than a decade now.

One other footnote is that PS/2 offered 5V output at higher-current than USB. I had a 2.5" USB/firewire hard drive with a PS/2 pass-thru adapter with a barrel plug coming out of it to power the portable drive, which was necessary, as mine wouldn't spin-up just from the power of a USB1.1/2.0 port and needed the boost. Firewire supplied more power, but wasn't very commonly available.

You mentioned POS... This extra power was also helpful for "keyboard wedge" barcode scanners, which wouldn't work over USB to PS/2 adapters, unless provided with extra DC input supply.

Really, really old news

In the early "AT" PC days, keyboards used a large 9-pin DIN connector.

When mice came along, they plugged into the RS-232 serial ports.

IBM released the PS/2 to try to kill off the clone manufacturers and take back control of the PC standard. They failed miserably, but one thing that stuck was PS/2 keyboard mouse ports, which began appearing on newer PCs. Kind of a shame if you ask me. Serial/com ports were useful for mice and a lot of other purposes (still around today at least in USB adapter form), while PS/2 mouse ports weren't useful for anything else and just died off once USB took over.

For keyboards this was no big deal. A cheap adapter converting the large 9-pin DIN to a smaller PS/2 connector worked great. Newer keyboards switched to PS/2 with adapters back to large AT DIN.

For mice, though, this was a real problem. For years, mice came with PS/2 connectors and a PS/2 to DE-9 adapter. The two protocols were different, so mice chipsets implemented both protocols for compatibility.

One footnote here is combo PS/2 keyboard/mouse ports. Saved hardly any physical space, but first laptops, and much later desktops after USB took over, only included a single PS/2 port for both. A mouse could be plugged-in directly, but a PS/2 splitter was needed to plug in a keyboard, or both keyboard and mouse. That wasn't noted on the ports, and many people were confused when plugging in their keyboard didn't work.

This was pretty much standard until USB came out. Nobody wanted to implement two levels of compatibility, so mice dropped RS-232 and instead implemented PS/2 and USB. As did keyboards.

Even if adapters weren't included, PS/2 support stayed around in the chipsets for well over a decade. Go back a few years, and there's a good chance your old keyboard will speak PS/2 if connected through an adapter... Doesn't matter whether green or purple, the adapters were the same for keyboards and mice.

And things like the trackpoint stayed as PS/2 devices way longer than you'd expect, before finally making the jump.

These days PS/2 compatibility is long gone.

I'm disappointed USB hubs in monitors didn't become standard. You've got to plug in a keyboard and mouse, and maybe more. You're always going to be using them near your monitor. Why not include a cheap hub and make it just one USB cable back to your PC? Makes things tidier. But it seems only Dell were convinced it was a good idea. You could always mount your own to your monitor stand. And of course these days wireless input devices are pretty common.

Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently

Re: Mainframe?

A mainframe wouldn't just boot-up after power was restored, either. And we're not just talking about pushing a button, but issuing commands.

I'm guessing it was a smaller terminal supervisor/controller unit (whatever IBM called them) was power-cycled, allowing the terminals to talk to the still-running mainframe again.

Ryan's Law

Ryan's Law:

Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish yourself as an expert.

https://murphyslawandmore.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/ryans-law/

Re: hot plug

the "US" plug shouldn't heat-up much.

They do, and it's not a problem. When you're pulling 10, 15, or 18 amps for half an hour at a time, even in the best case the plug and cord will become notably warm. Commonly seen with vacuum cleaners, space heaters, etc.

it likes to go into runaway, and burn.

We're not talking about arcs due to worn-out plugs, or going way over the rated current... Just operating *close* to the rated current for an extended period of time.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

How would you feel about a smoke detector that goes off every time someone sneezes?

Telling the difference between very common and non-threatening events, and actually serious risks to safety, is what makes something a proper detector.