Posts by rcxb

Network engineer chose humiliation over a night on the datacenter floor

being stuck in such a place while the temperature rises and the air slowly fills with smoke is not a pleasant way to die

Is anyone that helpless? I'd have my keys in one hand and large coins in the other, quickly disassembling the door locks, gouging around the latch, hinges, or similar. Even just kicking a wall panel for a couple hours is likely to cause it to fail.

Besides, fail-secure rooms have standards to meet, such that anything remotely flammable is kept far away, and smoke alarms are actively monitored and will release the locks.

Abandoned US Army 'city under the ice' imaged in serendipitous NASA find

Re: Context in reporting....

pooling on one specific spot on land.

Do you have any conception of where we're talking about?

The far north... 250km inland from the nearest big city on the coast, with its population of 650 people.

Residents of Camp Century weren't out hunting polar bears and setting up reindeer petting zoos. There's no animal life in the area, and very little could even potentially get there.

This is very much a tree falling in the forest with no-one around to hear it. Or at least it will be, in a couple centuries...

"eventually highly diluted contaminates in melt water could be released at the coast 250 km away, but even then it would be in the 22nd century or later" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Century#Residual_environmental_hazards

A year after Broadcom took control of VMware, it's in the box seat

It's called "eating your seed corn" or "trading your future."

Re: What Rivals?

How about XenServer, or rather "Citrix Private Cloud" now?

Maybe even Hyper-V?

DARPA-backed voting system for soldiers abroad savaged

The "real difference" is 16%:

"The rate of election participation among those in the military was significantly lower than the rate for civilians in 2022 (26 percent v. 42 percent)"

D-Link tells users to trash old VPN routers over bug too dangerous to identify

Re: OpenWRT?

It does not appear any of the DSR- series is supported by OpenWRT. Though several other D-Link devices are:

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

That's the #1 thing I check on before buying, so that I don't ever have to throw out working hardware.

If enough people did the same, there's be significant extra value for the manufacturers to make sure they can offer that "feature" (which costs them practically nothing) when the device is new. At EOL, it's too late to get the manufacturer to do anything to help.

Windows 95 setup was three programs in a trench coat, Microsoft vet reveals

Sometimes bootstrapping like that is the only way to do things

Umm, no. Microsoft could have easily written the full installer as e.g. a DOS application. It was simply a matter of expediency that they cobbled together some DOS bits, some Win3.1 bits, and then finished with some Win95 bits.

Undergrad thought he had mastered Unix in weeks. Then he discovered rm -rf

Re: Ah....backups....

....and I still wonder how many systems have backups which have never been tested. Someone out there might be able to tell me.

With the advent of LTO, all tapes are verified when they are written, so none are properly "corrupt".

Verifying the contents are what you want is another matter... Unless you work for a company with programmers like I've got to put up with.

* Despite repeated training on Unix file ownership and permissions, all files and folders are set: chmod 777

* Critical files even in prod get deleted all the time. None of them have a clue who's program got bugged and clobbered the prod files... just restore from backup and get on with life.

* When did the important folder on the dev system get deleted? "Oh, I dunno, last time I used it was 3 years ago."

Re: Bold move

File versioning has nothing at all to do with file system snapshots.

"Each file version is stored as a separate file"

https://wiki.vmssoftware.com/File_version

They're more like Unix hidden files, just with a special naming scheme and a few utilities that understand the scheme.

Instead of and /etc/ full of postfix.conf-June21threeCpR type files, we could have just postfix.conf, with (hidden) versions ;1 ;2 and ;3 you could access as needed.

Airbus A380 flew for 300 hours with metre-long tool left inside engine

Photo of the incident

I expect the missing-tool incident went something like this:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71dmyRCtkTL._SL1500_.jpg

Thanks, Linus. Torvalds patch improves Linux performance by 2.6%

Re: UABP

All modern processors are affected by Spectre flaws:

"Spectre has been shown to work on Intel, AMD, ARM-based, and IBM processors."

It's a question of superscalar pipelined processors. Not RISC vs CISC. x86 CPUs are RISC behind the scenes, anyhow.

All modern processors have those traits, or else they'd perform terribly.

no way their terrible chipset would have gotten inside as many machines as it ended up in.

Transmeta floundered because Intel simply appropriated their technologies, allowing them to jump ahead in energy efficiency:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1565866/intel-settles-patent-case-with-transmeta-for-250m.html

Re: It shows indeed

Duke Nukem Forever was release a decade ago. HURD still not ready...

Judge decides not to block Musk's $1M election giveaway

Re: Read the small print

It didn't say *selected at random* though, did it?

You might try reading through the article you're commenting on, before you post a comment.

El Reg clearly said:

"Musk describe the prize as random at the October 19 rally."

As this is violating a State, not a Federal law, there's nothing the President can do to prevent prosecution of the case.

That's why Musk wanted it switched to Federal court, but was rebuffed.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

The boy who cried "Job opening"

I had one recruiting company that, over a couple years, kept asking me to do video meetings with them saying there was a specific job opening. After the 3rd time, with no job details, follow-up, let alone an offer, I told them to remove my info and stop contacting me.

Pulling hostile stuff like that just weeds out the decent people. Sure, you'll keep getting resumes from the desperate, the blatant liars, the mentally ill, etc., but everybody in demand or with any self-respect will avoid your company.

Hide the keyboard – it's the only way to keep this software running

Re: Wat?

Even he ought to have correlated the effect with the cause after a few days.

Are you kidding? I had a user who would report, every single day, that going to a certain website caused the computer audio to stop working, necessitating a system reboot. This user dutifully reported the issue to their supervisor and manager, day after day, for a full 2 months and change, before I finally chimed in and asked the manager why they didn't just tell the user to stop going to said website, which none of the other users ever go to.

GCC 15 to keep Itanium support for now, after all

Anybody here still running Itanium CPUs and care to explain why? I installed/maintained one Itanium HP-UX system years ago, but that was just a stop-gap meant to be used for a couple years while the application was ported and QA'd. The writing was on the wall pretty early on that it wasn't going to be around long, so a terrible ecosystem to start to buy into.

If you need higher single-core speeds or better RAS than x86-64, IBM/POWER seems to be the only option left. Their exorbitant prices for equipment and support keeping them afloat despite ever-declining market share.

Though the later would be easily solved if if Dell/HP/etc servers had a BIOS option to run CPUs in a "mirror mode" the way they allow you to do so with RAM... Cheap commodity servers could have the best RAS around.

Linux admin asked savvy scientist for IT help and the boffin blew it

I could do it about as quickly as I could type that sentence. RJ45 connectors will never be as quick.

With decent tools, pass-thru RJ45 crimp plugs are nearly as fast.

110 blocks are a bit slower, but by how much depends on wiring scheme (how many pairs you need to split).

AWS boss: Don't want to come back to the office? Go work somewhere else

Re: Moved!

Nobody likes to think of themselves as run of the mill employees, we're all special, but the truth is only a handful of us are either special enough, or persuasive enough, to get away with it.

You don't need to be "special". It's not a gift given at the expense of others. People pay for the convenience of WFH by working longer hours, accepting lower salary, and more.

Either your job requires you to be on-site, or it does not. If it does not, then forcing attendance is irrational, results in high salaries or less qualified employees. That makes your company less competitive against others who are not forcing attendance when not required.

Even more than that... if remote work isn't feasible, then it would be more reliable for companies to have their servers on-site, rather than in AWS, so that an internet outage won't render it unavailable to on-site employees.

Re: Moved!

the cost for groceries then is roughly what I pay for them now

California is only 18th (out of 50 US states) for grocery prices:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/grocery-prices-by-state

So we're only talking about 15% above average. And that's 15% extra on just 6% (US average) of your "food at home" disposable income...

Of course you can find expensive groceries stores anywhere. "Whole Foods" being derisively called "Whole Paycheck" for example, but that's down to consumer choice, not an inherent cost of living in the state.

California is larger than most Europeans countries, and has both high and low cost-of-living areas. Income taxes are a bit higher, but generally insignificant to non-billionaires. Gasoline prices are higher (much lower than in Europe), but not a significant expense except for a tiny fraction of a percentage of extreme commuters/commercial drivers.

Re: Moved!

a large number of Californians moved out of state

I don't consider 0.1%/yr a "large number".

The slight decline in California's population is only notable because it is the first time it happened in 170 years straight... And it only lasted 3 years before reversing in 2023.

It also aligns with mass retirement... i.e. the "Baby Boom" (children of returning WWII veterans) are have started hitting retirement age, which is a common time for people to decide to move. COVID-19 surely played a role as well.

California is larger than most Europeans countries, and has both high and low cost-of-living areas. Income taxes are a bit higher, but generally insignificant to non-billionaires. Gasoline prices are higher (much lower than in Europe), but not a significant expense except for a tiny fraction of a percentage of extreme commuters/commercial drivers.

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

Re: Simplest solution

law mandating that end users be given access to the Source Code of any software they run on their machines

Any binary can be disassembled pretty easily. There you go... assembler source code for all your software. Have fun.

But any modified version won't match the digital signature, so you can't actually RUN it, of course.

Sysadmins rage over Apple’s ‘nightmarish’ SSL/TLS cert lifespan cuts plot

Re: Follow the money

I've only seen the price of SSL certs going down over the years, even as certificate expirations have gotten shorter.

$4/yr for one site and $39/yr for a wildcard: https://www.ssls.com/

Back in 2009 when certificates were valid for several years, it was $9/yr for one site, and just under $130/yr for a wildcard: https://web.archive.org/web/20091029141332/http://www.cheapssls.com/

Not to mention FREE certificates came along, from Let's Encrypt and other similar projects.

All this will do is force EVERYONE to either use free, automatically issued certificates, or create their own internal CAs and put self-signed certificates (with 10+ year expiration dates) on everything they can't easily automate. And maybe it'll force browser makers to add an option to accept expired certificates, rather than being entirely cut-off from the many websites that'll run into issues.

You're right not to rush into running AMD, Intel's new manycore monster CPUs

Re: Less is More - Not

I'd be a lot happier with 200 separate components each dissipating one watt than one large component dissipating 200 watts.

Ah yes, the ago old question...

https://external-preview.redd.it/pPTZUhoeh4yBV7CBhgHJz4lB7_BCSEgFSqHxFCc_mfg.jpg?auto=webp&s=65381afbab38be4c1803db6c6756402c811b56d0

Revenge for being fired is best served profitably

"these days"... you can download a Windows 10 install ISO directly from Microsoft.com and just click "I don't have one" when it asks for a key, and use it forever with a fews nags.

And that's the worst-case. "these days"... any OEM PC that came with Windows (7+) installed will read the key right from the UEFI tables, authorize without issue, and never prompt you to enter it.

Re: Similar

running the Wyse software on the old PC's as would be pretty much free

I also worked for a company heavily dependent on WYSE emulation for many of their programs, but I certainly didn't find WYSE emulators to be free. WYSE rarely showed up in any free or cheap terminal emulators, and even if it did, price of the product was a pretty good approximation of the quality of the WYSE emulation,

These days you can modify an open source one to fit: https://github.com/gutschke/wy60

FBI claims corrupt LA cops helped crypto CEO's cash grab

Re: Los Angeles

Los Angeles, quite famously, has a police department ("LAPD"), NOT a sheriff (LASD).

Article repeatedly says "LASD" which means Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

The City of Los Angeles is just one small corner of Los Angeles County, and one of just 88 incorporated cities, according to Wikipedia.

"The LASD provides municipal police services to the unincorporated communities and 42 of the 88 cities within Los Angeles County"

There's some grey area of course... Outsiders might be happy to call West Hollywood "L.A.", but NOBODY would call Lancaster "L.A." despite being in the county (over the mountains, out in the desert).

Some US Kaspersky customers find their security software replaced by 'UltraAV'

Norton 360 with LifeLock - $189.99/yr

McAfee+ Advanced Individual: $199.99/yr

Both offer cheaper versions, and both offer big discounts for the first year, but still... You gotta have a crazy high list price to offer seemingly big discounts all the time.

Intel has officially entered the grin and bear it phase of its recovery

Re: Hmmm.

1970s, the US was not really interested in exporting oil and gas to anyone

Building terminals would NOT have resulted in dependency on the US... Several middle-eastern countries ship gas. And Russian gas would still be there. But with competition, instead of a single source.

a sensible renewables policy then the shock after the Ukraine wouldn't have been half so great

It's easy to say in hindsight now that we have a hard date, but what if Russia had cut-off gas supplies years earlier?

Re: Hmmm.

time to start to look at depending on ourselves. I think the Russian incursion into Ukraine and what that did to gas prices (and by some weird bullshit excuse, electricity prices) was a bit of a wake-up to some that having important things entirely reliant upon the whims of external forces "simply because it's the cheap option" is not great planning.

You've learned entirely the wrong lesson...

Dependency on Russia was always an obviously bad idea. The US was lobbying Europe to install natural gas terminals for decades, so there could be multiple sources of energy supplies, even if not quite as cheap. Instead, leaders (like Merkle) preferred to gamble that they'd become self-sufficient with green energy before there was any interruption to flows from Russia. They lost that bet.

High-tech fabs need scale, and the EU doesn't have the population to make it work with just their own domestic market. Trying to compete against fabs in Taiwan, Korea, and now the US simultaneously is guaranteed to be a losing battle. While an EU fab would be domestic, is would still a single-source and single point-of-failure, particularly vulnerable to failing to keep-up with newer processes (like Intel has).

A better strategy would be for the EU to partner with the US on fabs. Let the US build new fabs domestically this time around, with the EU supporting that development and contracted to buy a certain number of chips from them... with the agreement requiring that the next subsized fab will be somewhere in the EU. Alternating back-and-forth would mean each side only has to provide half as much subsidy, both will have a second-source of chips outside of Asia, and each is only a single node-shrink behind in the event of any kind of disruption of Atlantic trade or political relations.

Re: This one sentence could have been the article's headline:

I can't see how they'll survive against those companies that really understand the motor industry, like Toyota, VW, Merc, Ford etc.

This seems to be wishful thinking. Tesla has the majority of the market, the most loyal customers, and keeps driving EV prices lower.

The listed legacy automakers are struggling terribly with their EV transitions, delaying scale-up and even lobbying for pushing back regulatory deadlines. VW's recent $5bln investment in Rivian is quite telling... With the success of Tesla and Chinese EV makers, it's looking like those established automakers might not even have a future, just an extended decline as they delay their EV transitions to maximize present-day profits.

IBM quietly axing thousands of jobs, source says

Re: What about the WARN notice?

everything stops the moment you step outside the building. Health insurance is a big one because while Federal law allows for the optional continuation of insurance for some months after termination the employee has to pay the premium -- the full, retail rate, premium rather than the normal employee percentage deducted from the paycheck -- which the vast majority of people just can't afford.

No, health insurance USED-TO be a big one. Now with Obamacare / ACA you can sign-up for health insurance on the marketplace the day you lose your job, and it has to cover all your pre-existing conditions. It may be subsidized if you submit all the info to prove your income is now low enough, or it may end up a bit higher than you were paying at work, but we're talking a few hundred, not terrible (like COBRA).

Mainframes aren't dead, they're just learning AI tricks

Re: Cratering market share...

I think they are entitled to name the various components as they like.

I wouldn't mind a name... I mind multiple names. Both CEC and CPC are official, but everyone (including IBM folks) instead uses the term "processor" everywhere.

A lot of this is because of the long history of the 360

Hardly an excuse to continue using antiquated terms. It's been fibre channel for decades now.

They keep bolting modern technology on (they don't keep using bus & tag) and going out of their way to give it a legacy interface, and giving no native/modern interface to it...

Re: Cratering market share...

Here's another one for mainframes, a couple years more recent, also shows a distinct downward trend:

https://i0.wp.com/www.itcandor.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ibm-z-rev.png

Source: https://www.itcandor.com/ibm-z16-rack-mount/

Re: Cratering market share...

The term CEC is very much used to refer to mainframes: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=concepts-mainframe-hardware-terminology

It certainly is possible, but in my experience extremely rare to have DASD/storage/disk in the mainframe rack. IBM's only current supported configuration is their 16U DS8910F model 993 in a lower configured z/System rack. It would probably only be desirable if floor space was at a high premium.

Wikipedia discusses where each vendor uses Xeon chips versus their own proprietary chips:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer#Current_market

Cratering market share...

Though a few years old now, this is the best visual of IBM Mainframe market share I've seen:

https://itjungle.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/tfh012521-story01-fig01.jpg

From: https://www.itjungle.com/2021/01/25/taking-the-full-measure-of-power-servers/

It wouldn't be fair to naively project that going down to zero in a few years, but it's safe to say it's a precipitous decline.

Kyndral's finding that "Ninety-six percent (96%) of respondents are moving some workloads off the mainframe" sounds about right to me.

Being a normal Linux/Unix/Network/SAN IT guy who has been supporting mainframe systems for several years, I can easily see why...

IBM firmly embraces proprietary systems and protocols, making them mandatory wherever possible, and slowly and reluctantly including "Open Systems" (i.e. standard) support only once their solutions are woefully unable to compete. And they keep as much lock-in as they can manage... z/OS still requires expensive and proprietart FICON/ECKD SAN disk (DASD) solutions, while Linux s390 can use any normal fibre channel SAN. IBM could easily emulate ECKD (and I think they eventually will have to), but that would undermine their storage system sales.

IBM publishes a huge amount of documentation, but you need to read something like 100X as much of it to accomplish the same tasks as on an x86-64 server... IBM documentation has a certain consistent style that is both incredibly wordy with useful bits of info very sparsely dispersed. Similarly, there's quite a few documents for every piece of hardware and software, and it's not obvious which 400+ page documents you should/need-to bother to read through.

Additionally, they don't produce any introductory documentation, and it doesn't appear anyone else does, either (awful light on z/System introductory books on the market)... I occasionally stumble upon a piece of documentation with a chapter or two that would have been a good introduction, but I was never able to find it with google/keyword searches back when I needed it, and it's typically 15 years out of date, so enough has changed in the IBM world to limit its usefulness.

Similarly, they hold strong to their legacy terminology... Perhaps wanting to keep all the nearly-retired IBM sysprogs comfortable and happy, or perhaps intentionally raising a barrier to entry for beginners (and also making sysprogs unable to operate or even cooperate with the non-IBM computer world. Terms like "storage" referring to RAM, "DASD" referring to disk, "CEC being the IBM preferred term for a mainframe but IBMer's still calling it a "processor" or "CPC" in the same breath.

I'd advise almost everyone to move any processes they can off of their mainframes. (I'd similarly advise to move services off of Kyndryl, as my experience with them was both technically disastrous, and terribly over-priced for the service offered.) Besides extracting a huge toll for companies to keep their IBM systems operating, fighting futilely against market forces to stay relevant, the crunch of the needed skilled individuals, they're also an ever-present obstacle to integrating with any and all other services or modernization initiatives.

You'll find a dictionary is quicker and more convenient than asking questions on forums. Though in this case an Encyclopedia does a better job:

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

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.