Posts by rcxb

Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many

Re: Somehow became corrupted?

The time wasted looking for an alternative set our project back (due to loss of the booking at the test facility), and it was still a fight to get them to order what we had already identified.

Did your purchase req. clearly specify "NO SUBSTITUTIONS", "EXPEDITE" and that it was a one-off purchase? Part of working for a large business is knowing how to fill-out the forms so the other groups will understand them... if not you personally, then your supervisor or manager should have the requisite knowhow & experience to get such requests through without trouble.

'Uncertainty' drives LinkedIn to migrate from CentOS to Azure Linux

Couldn't this article have been shortened to:

"Microsoft division switches to Microsoft Linux distro, gushes about how great it is... Actually ran into several problems. Similar benefits would have come from an upgrade to any modern distro."

To crew, or not to crew – that is the question facing Boeing's stricken Starliner

With this being such a public issue, they'd better be 100% sure before approving return aboard the Boeing capsule. If they do, and the crew doesn't make it back, NASA heads are sure to roll.

UK tech pioneer Mike Lynch dead at 59

"the enemy" have the power to control the weather

Not really... they just need enough patience to wait for bad weather before using their super-secret remote-operated boat-sinking equipment they previously planted.

NOTE: Not that I endorse any such crazy theories. After all... this was clearly the work of Cthulhu

Faulty instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs blow away all security

Re: Only on T-Head's CPUs

It’s just not possible to say “RISC-V chips are safe”.

It's not possible to say x86-64 chips are safe, either...

If, for example, you are running with these Scaleway cloud people, how would you know? How could you know if it were newly fixed silicon or not - because even *they* don’t know.

A problem with cloud or other hosted multi-tenant services in general. The hypervisor makes it possible to lie to the VMs (or containers) about what CPU they are running on, so you can't be sure. If you don't trust your cloud/hosting provider to keep things secure for you, what the bloody hell good are they? That's pretty much their job description #1. You might as well let John Doe host your servers out of a rack in his cellar...

Porting the Windows 95 Start Menu to NT

Re: "the Windows Start Menu was a pure thing"

The original Start Menu was a masterpiece in organisational simplicity.

Really? As I recall the Start menu was a mess of a unnecessary tree of sub-sub-sub menus for anything you could want to get to. e.g.:

Start -> Program Files -> Adobe Software -> Acrobat Reader for Windows Free:

And never minding the horrible ergonomics of Start on the bottom, Program files on the top, and how time consuming it was to navigate that tree of folders every time you wanted to access some frequently used program...

Even then, you still had a cluttered mess of garbage shortcuts to pick through with nothing making the main one you want stand out at all... Something like:

* Visit Adobe.com

* Buy Adobe Software Suite

* Uninstall / Reinstall

* Acrobat

* Online Help

* Plugins marketplace

* Extra Tools

Nvidia's next Linux driver to be… just as open

Re: Nvidia? Not for me.

F Nvida and the horse they rode into town on. Drop those prices in half and we can overlook it.

Nvidia really doesn't care about home market customers like me and you. They've been making big bucks from cryptocoin mining, data center GPU processing, and AI.

Unless... you're an AI.

Are you an AI?

Your next datacenter could be in the middle of nowhere

Re: Communal heating

harder to reuse the heat for communal hot water etc.

Not a huge demand for heating in Australia...

You're not likely to see the Winter Olympics held there.

Re: Cheap but not clean, perhaps

comes from gas turbines. Even with daytime solar assist, and wind (of which there's not many details) that's still not a particularly clean source

Gas is quite clean, just not free of CO2.

If you're located near wells, some of that gas may be free... Shipping it to a nearby power plant may avoid the need to flare off excess at the tower. Long-distance gas pipelines are often at capacity, so consuming some unexpected excess locally (somehow) is often required.

Price is usually a reasonable proxy for environmental impact...

Linux geeks cheer as Arm wrestles x86

ARM needs to standardize

penguin botherers may be interested to know that German Linux laptop vendor Tuxedo Computers is working on a Snapdragon X-based Linux laptop.

What would really be interesting, is if companies making ARM systems would finally come together and standardize.

I have a single USB thumb drive that is bootable on every x86 / x86-64 system... I can boot-up into Linux (or Windows) live systems for repairs, run hardware tests, and install a new OS. All with properly working keyboard, mouse video and networking support on an PC based system out there. No having to figure out the model of the device, going to the manufacturer to get binary blob drivers to slipstream onto the boot/install media and patching them into the kernel to get any video output, no need to use another system to create system image and dump it to an SD card, etc.

Until most/all ARM systems manufactures standardize their products so that they can be bootstrapped and installed as uniformly and as easily as PCs, they're going to remain proprietary kit, and 2nd-class citizens in the computing world.

Spam blocklist SORBS closed by its owner, Proofpoint

Re: Double opt-in demands

SORBS blocked no-one

SORBS provides a "Block List" as it says right on their homepage (and partially in their acronym). Can't wash their hands of responsibility when someone used it as intended, and it caused problems.

The "amateur admins" simply didn't know better... did not realize what a terrible organization they were relying on.

Double opt-in demands

SORBS was the worst offender... Blocking anyone at the drop of a hat for no particular reason. with zero thought.

Send out millions of e-mails every month without complaints? Okay, whatever.

ONE customer's e-mail address gets mistyped dropping one letter, so it goes to a honeypot domain.... Your domain instantly BLOCKED by SORBs (and nobody else) and ALL e-mails get blocked by ALL the domains whose admins are amateurs and subscribe to SORBS.

TSMC mulled moving chip fabs from Taiwan over China threat

Re: Intel is a solution

Intel has had fabs around the world since 1985... Most recently, 14nm/10nm in Israel, 7nm in Ireland, etc.

It's mostly because of recent US government subsidies that Intel is doing its most advanced process in the US, and TSMC is building a fab in the US as well, for the same reason.

Google thinks AI can Google better than you can

Ironically, searching for "DSCLI-7.8.59.215.iso" on most search engines now turns up the above comment... Yandex doesn't, so far.

For those finding this in some distant future, do let me know. Also:

DSCLI-7.8.59.215.iso is at: https://delivery04.dhe.ibm.com/sar/CMA/SDA/0bpgn/0/

A newer version (several years old) is now available: DSCLI-7.8.59.249.iso which is at: https://delivery04.dhe.ibm.com/sar/CMA/SDA/0cahd/0/

Slightly older DSCLI-7.8.58.11.iso at: https://delivery04.dhe.ibm.com/sar/CMA/SDA/09m9n/0/

And for old DS8700 compatibility, DSCLI-7.7.21.39.iso as well as even older versions can be found at: https://www3.software.ibm.com/storage/ds8000/updates/DS8K_Customer_Download_Files/CLI/

I've gone through and had web.archive.org save these files for future access, but it has no search facility, you need to know the exact URLs.

Above install correctly on either RHEL8 or RHEL9, and the /opt/ibm/ folder can be copied over and lib/CLI.CFG manually edited to point to the correct java CLASSPATH dir. Good luck with your old/retro DS8000 SAN journey.

google is simply going to be scraping pages and giving you their information without even linking through

Easy solution:

1) Search Google for torrents of a new movie

2) When it returns a torrent or magnet link, sue Google for copyright infringement.

Google is going the exact OPPOSITE way they should, ignoring search terms that will narrow down results and instead funneling everyone into the most popular search results.

Found an interesting example the other day... I know "DSCLI-7.8.59.215.iso" is available on IBM's website, and I know Google indexes that site, but a Google search for the exact quoted term turns up no results. Meanwhile, an Yandex search will find the correct page for you. Coincidentally, Yandex pops-up bot challenges every couple pages/queries, an unforced error damaging its own usefulness.

Anybody got other search engines to try? DuckDuckGo, Bing, Dogpile & Ask don't do any better than Google here. The previous plethora of search engines seems to have died off in the face of Google. I bet AllTheWeb would have worked if it was still around.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries bets big on small turbines for datacenters

Hydrogen makes zero sense. It's inefficient to create it, and there's very little infrastructure for it. It seems to be the go-to buzzword for those who love fossil fuels but need some green-washing for PR. The same niche filled by "clean coal" about 20 years ago.

In the US at least, the practical option would be natural gas turbines for electrical generation. with absorption chillers running off the waste heat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0tsDsVC21o

The only downside being the lack of green-washing that "hydrogen" buys you, but you could do a lot more actual good by complimenting the gas turbines with as much solar PV as you can reasonably install, to reduce the need for natural gas.

How Apple Wi-Fi Positioning System can be abused to track people around the globe

Re: This :-

And for the other 99.999% of the population?

Instead of buying the one first shinny one they see, they can easily check that the Wi-Fi router/AP they want has OpenWRT support:

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128

Even if they use vendor firmware, at least they've always got the option to upgrade to OpenWRT later. Resale/reuse value will remain much higher as a result as well.

Re: This :-

Since 2010, I've made sure every Wi-Fi router/AP I buy has OpenWRT support:

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128

Even if I use vendor firmware at first, I know I've always got the option to load OpenWRT later. In fact I only quite recently stopped using my 2010 (802.11n) AP.

Elon Musk says he doesn’t want 100% tariff on China-made electric vehicles

While the US objects to Chinese subsidies, Tesla has benefited greatly from US subsidies and tax breaks, which are only available for US made electric vehicles. Not entirely equivalent, but the US pretend their hands are entirely clean of market manipulation. And if the US really wants a policy shift to EVs, they should let China dump cheap EVs on the market to spur widespread adoption.

It's non-EV manufacturers who would stand to lose out to Chinese EVs, and honestly, they deserve to. The future is EVs, anybody not pivoting hard to them right now will be going out of business in 20 years, this trade barrier will only keep that from being shortened by a few years.

Destroying offshore wind farms is top priority for Trump if he returns to presidency

Quoth El Reg: "offshore wind turbines have a taste for whale blood"

Hoping this will work out as well as his last headline campaign promise: Building a border wall, Mexico paying for it.

https://i.imgflip.com/1jesqs.jpg

Just keep Kristi Noem far away...

IBM sued again for alleged discrimination – this time against White males

Re: Finally...

In the U.S.A. right now women are graduating University at close to DOUBLE the rate of men. Additionally, whites are only maintaining the narrowest majority there today, and likely to slip into minority status in short order.

https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

Do we need to give women and non-whites their own 600 years of dominance and oppression of others to even things out?

I don't really feel like my ancestors had a great 600 years of privilege that gave me a huge advantage, deserving of being discriminated against now... but maybe that's just because I'm Irish:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsg29nIkl5o

Re: Do you hear that noise?

~50% of the population is female, you'd expect a bare minimum of 25% female employees (assuming a suitable sample size I.e. not a small business). If it's less than that then there's a bias.

It seems strange to me to force large numbers of women to become e.g. sanitation workers, and men to become e.g. nurses & therapists. Please explain why exactly is it that we need to do so.

And how would we do so, exactly? Is it like sports where we have to create separate-but-equal companies where only women are allowed?

I told Halle Berry where to go during a programming gig in LA

Re: Alternative uses for hotels

we got asked if we wanted a good time

"You got baseball cards?"

- Tank Girl (1995)

Huawei's latest smartphone features mostly made-in-China components

that probably isn't a deal breaker if the prices is right

With low yields, the price is really quite high. However, the Chinese government is happy to dump money on SMIC and Huawei, keeping the sale price low, in order to hide the fact that sanctions are hurting.

NSA guy who tried and failed to spy for Russia gets 262 months in the slammer

I want to use nuclear secrets documents as place-mats for my dinner parties...

Microsoft really does not want Windows 11 running on ancient PCs

Re: Alternative

Quite a lot, but by no means all - especially where businesses rely on specialist software which has been around for a while.

You may be talking about SMALL businesses.

Large businesses will either harass the supplier into doing so, or will write their own software that runs on the platform they prefer with a minimum of trouble.

I ran a mid-size company that was running Linux... there were a few Windows programs that were needed, which meant a few departments had a couple PCs running Windows, among the hundreds of Linux PCs. And more than that, many of those programs required XP... so running Win10 on your desktop instead of Linux doesn't help one bit.

There is also the user training issue

RIGHT! And Windows changing the UI with EVERY VERSION is an absolute NIGHTMARE for user training.

Meanwhile, our employees kept using the IDENTICAL Xfce (kiosk mode) user interface from 2004 to 2024...

If your users are familiar with Windows, it's the easiest thing in the world to customize your Linux desktop to have the panel on the bottom, with the main applications icon on the far left.

And don't get started about Office... LibreOffice doesn't change the UI around. Microsoft Office forcing the "ribbon" interface on everyone was a training nightmare.

TSMC expects customers to pay more for chips fabbed overseas

That wasn't the deal

TSMC already got a ton of money up-front to compensate for the cost difference. Saying that wasn't enough and they want more on the back-end, forever, isn't going to go over well.

It's going to get ugly if they build a fab and let it sit idle because almost nobody (except military & spy agencies) are willing to pay extra for domestic US fabbed chips. If they produce a bit, at least the capacity will be there in case anything happens to the Taiwan fabs, transit from the area, or just a surge in demand.

Senator Warren slams Intuit's 'junk fees' as America's Tax Day rolls around again

are people somehow actually paying Intuit $150?

If you file your taxes in person at H&R Block, I don't think you can get out the door without paying at least $150.

https://www.hrblock.com/tax-offices/upfront-pricing/

https://www.mightytaxes.com/hr-block-pricing/

I expect most people don't enjoy or don't trust themselves to "enter the number from line 14a. on line 27 if it is greater than than the number on line 8" for a couple hours of their life, and instead prefer to let someone else trudge through it.

Re: A solution?

No, businesses will just have their lawyers find the best way to slither around any such rule.

The solution is to have IRS.gov provide a free service to fill out your taxes, getting all the tax prep services out of it entirely. They've got all your tax info, they could easily pre-fill a tax return for you, and just let you scrutinize it and either submit as-is, or go through and make any changes / itemizations you want/need.

The only reason the IRS didn't start providing this service a couple decades ago is the for-profit tax services lobbied against it, and they all agreed to provide free filing options for cheaper/simplel tax returns, in exchange for the IRS scuttling the plan. Since they've demonstrated their bad faith, it's back to plan A.

They are starting to do this now. "Direct File" is available this year for "12 pilot states". Hopefully this will be expanded to the rest by next year.

Some IRA free file partners are honest. https://www.olt.com/ will allow you to file Federal taxes up to any income level for free. They prompt you to spend a few dollars for greater features, but you can opt out. However, state taxes aren't free, about $10 if you file through them. Some states don't have income taxes, and others have their own websites to allow free filing, but paying OLT $10 to pre-fill your state return may be the most convenient.

GCC 15 dropping IA64 support is final nail in the coffin for Itanium architecture

Re: Take some credit

Back in 2000 we had a whole bunch more to choose from and life was more interesting.

In the early 2000s they were around, but all on life-support and everybody knew it.

US 'considering' end to Assange prosecution bid

Re: Prodding the bear

If you're going to bring "Julian Assange's actual character" into it, then we have to discuss the time he promised to turn himself in to serve US prison time if Obama granted clemency for Manning. Obama did commute Manning's sentence some weeks later. After which Assange used every bit of tortured logic he could come up with to back out of his pledge:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/assange-weasels-out-of-pledge-to-surrender-if-manning-received-clemency/

Windows 95 support chap skipped a step and sent user into Micro-hell

Re: Don't follow the instructions

better worded to avoid such ambiguity, something like "reinsert the disc that you used previously (in steps 4-7)" or something.

But after I insert the disk by step 4, the manual doesn't close properly anymore...

Re: Don't follow the instructions

I've never, ever seen a floppy drive with the words 'Eject' near the eject button

The Japanese Kanji symbol for "eject" *just happens* to be indistinguishable from a rectangle...

Re: Those were peak 'fix by reinstall' days

OpenVMS' stability had nothing to do with the list of supported hardware, and everything to do with being a microkernel operating system that ran even drivers in an unpriv context, monitored them, and restarted them when they misbehaved with the end user none the wiser as to the near crash.

Memory protections have been a hardware feature since Intel 286s at least.

Re: Those were peak 'fix by reinstall' days

the vast majority of crashes were caused by shitty drivers rather than Windows itself.

Windows needed drivers to run.

Windows did nothing to ensure drivers behaved.

Windows crashed.

OpenVMS ensured drivers behaved.

OpenVMS didn't crash.

Re: Don't follow the instructions

Day 1, I followed the instructions, erased all the files on the user disk [...]

My supervisor said (face palm moment) that is an example of the command - not the actual command.

The documentation was changed to make it clearer

You're anecdote reminds me very much of some the users I had to support, years back.

Day 3: You're NOT supposed to type the quotation marks around the command.

Day 4: You missed the step that tells you to exit the editor. The commands don't work because you're just typing them all into a text document...

Day 5: The word "replace" means "put the disk back in," NOT "throw it in the trash and go get a new one."

Day 6: Nothing wrong with your computer. It keeps rebooting because you keep pushing the reset button when you mean to push the floppy disk eject button. Yes, it did work fine yesterday, because yesterday you pushed the correct button... It's not the computer that forgot how to do its job from one day to the next.

US insurers use drone photos to deny home insurance policies

Re: A physical visit is a lot more reliable

Some motorcycle racing drivers are forbidden to ride bikes on the street by their contracts, even.

That's probably not because of a risk they will break the law, more likely just because they're valuable assets, and there's a vastly higher risk of motorcyclists on the street getting seriously injured or killed in accidents.

Fatality Rate, Per 100 million vehicle miles traveled 2017 Motorcycles: 25.67 Passenger cars: 0.94

https://www.autoinsurance.org/motorcycle-vs-car-accidents/

Ex-Microsoft engineer gets seven years after trying to hire hitman for double murder

Headlines

Couldn't we get a better headline on this one? Something like:

"Working at Microsoft drives man to hire hitman"

Feds finally decide to do something about years-old SS7 spy holes in phone networks

Re: As far back as 2007?

You mean like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN

And this:

https://www.fcc.gov/TRACEDAct

You break it, you ... run away and hope somebody else fixes it

I'll just leave this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8I6qt_Z0Cg

Do not touch that computer. Not even while wearing gloves. It is a biohazard

They can make them a different color, but won't guarantee they'll last as long... Nothing blocks UV and stays stable for years of hard use quite as well as carbon black.

Beijing issues list of approved CPUs – with no Intel or AMD

Re: Those Chinese Linux distributions are still Linux, right?

Without the GNU tools and utilities he wrote as part of the GNU effort Linus would have had nothing to boot his kernel with or even make it to start with.

Instead of GNU, Linus could easily have used the open source 4.4BSD-Lite userland.

What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?

Re: glueing thin clients

I still didn't see is one of those computer with VESA mounts on both sides - so we could sandwich them between the monitor and the arm support.

Look for thin-client VESA mounts:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B073523D7N/

London Clinic probes claim staffer tried to peek at Princess Kate's records

Don't dignify the tabloids

Yet the princess's prolonged absence from public life since has led to all sorts of rumor and speculation about the true state of her health. Fears - among some - were stoked further when she released a digitally doctored photo of her with her children on Mothering Sunday.

The fact that tabloids whipped themselves up into a frothing fit about something, doesn't make it notable/newsworthy. The "doctored" photo in question was a matter of minor touch-ups, not pasting Kate's face on someone else's body... a minor faux pas that gave the tabloids an opportunity to scream a bit longer about their self-invented non-story. Lots of smoke, but no fire.

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

Re: Flow batteries

Article discussed stationary applications, so I was too.

Are there any viable mobile applications for hydrogen fuel cells? Hydrogen cars haven't panned out. Li-Ion battery powered cars ate their lunch.

I know *methanol* fuel cells have some popularity in forklifts.

Flow batteries

I fail to see the use-case of a hydrogen fuel cell, other than in space-based applications.

Whether you're using it like a battery (generating fuel on-site) or a generator (hauled-in via truck of pipeline) it will be cheaper and more efficient to do the the same with electrolyte (instead of hydrogen) for a redox flow battery (instead of a fuel cell).

Justice Dept reportedly starts criminal probe into Boeing door bolt incident

Re: And another one today

Mule-drawn canal barges are the epitome of transportation.

Microsoft drags Windows Subsystem for Android into the trash

Amazon dropping Android for Vega

Maybe this is related to Amazon dropping Android on their Fire devices for a much more locked down "Vega".

Microsoft hitched their wagon to the Amazon Android Store, which will be going away sooner rather than later. And they're not about to go to Google and have the Play Store on Win11. If they were smart, they'd switch to F-Droid.

As a matter of fact, I don't see that el reg has reported on that story. But we have no shortage of NextPlatform articles about a 3% speed-bump of whatever data center product.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-is-dropping-android-for-vega-smart-device-operating-system

'We had to educate Oracle about our contract,' CIO says after Big Red audit

Non-Oracle Java

Cut out the Oracle stuff out before the infection takes over...

Even for old platforms there OpenJDK builds out there, they're just difficult to find:

https://github.com/alexkasko/openjdk-unofficial-builds#openjdk-unofficial-installers-for-windows-linux-and-mac-os-x

https://github.com/ojdkbuild/ojdkbuild

https://adoptopenjdk.net/releases.html

https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/downloads/

https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/

Amazon goes nuclear, acquires Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650M

its 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant

I love their chainsaws...