Posts by rcxb

Douglas Adams was right: Telephone sanitizers are terrible human beings

It's worse these days. Carriers are trying to cut costs by consolidating and replacing old lines with fibre. And the workers they are hiring to do this are just 3rd party contractors, so when there's a few lines out of a bundle that they can't easily reroute, they just cut them anyhow and leave it for others to fix, and deal with the customer fallout.

Had exactly this happen a year ago on a few important phone lines at the office. Just went dead, no notice or warning. Called for service but took a few days to get technicians out, and they had to scramble to find some way to fix them.

The contractors even had it in their work log that lines X, Y, Z were active, but they went ahead with the work regardless. Insisted on a decent amount of money off our bill, because they (the contractors they hired, who weren't adequately supervised) knowingly and intentionally severed our service and left it disabled.

TSMC says Arizona fab behind schedule, blames chip geek shortage

Guys, you're building very thirsty plants in the desert at the tail end of a dying Colorado River.

I find it very strange to frequently hear this refrain. Would it be better to raze a few square miles of old-growth forest to build on, instead? Or is it perhaps better to evict a few lizards and figure out how to bring in some water?

Water is cheap. Why would you make your least expensive component dominate your decision making process? Pipelines, aqueducts, trucks, trains and recycling/filtration are things that exist and can deliver water to you at varying levels of expense.

And it's not as if only the desert has water shortages. Minnesota is currently under water use restrictions due to drought. It's difficult to find anywhere that doesn't routinely face drought and water shortages. But perhaps you'll feel better when they announce "unexpected" water shortages in some Arctic wasteland? Of course there they'll have the "unexpected" frozen equipment stopping production, too.

Indian developer fired 90 percent of tech support team, outsourced the job to AI

Re: Support Level I LLM-Chatbot Works Fine, Until ...

it is working as desired. The chatbot is replacing the large amount of relatively clueless level 1 support.

That's the claim, but do we have any evidence it's actually doing so?

I remember Verizon call centers years ago, where the reps would tell me everything was fine, my issue was going to be fixed "tomorrow" every time I called, and would mark cases as resolved every time. I bet those agents have superb support statistics, showing short calls and all issues resolved within minutes, even though none of them ever actually helped me (or anyone else).

Re: Support Level I LLM-Chatbot Works Fine, Until ...

Because a human won't keep repeating "I don't understand, please select from options 1-5" while you're screaming at them that you've got a different issues that you need to escalate to a superior, and then suddenly drop your call/chat when you don't.

That's when all the performance and savings come from. Turn your support methods into a dystopian hell-scape and customers will very quickly give up on support and just cancel their service.

The only time a chat bot is useful (using the term loosely) for me is when all I need to do is something that should by all rights be a check-box on the company website, but isn't, and so you're herded into the automated chat bot option.

So there are plenty of ways to manipulate the system, to make the automated bots performance look good, even when it's utter trash wasting everyone's time.

Red Hat's open source rot took root when IBM walked in

Red Hat was, and is, leaving a lot of money on the table.

That's purely imaginary money... You'll find when you try to FORCE free users to pay full price, they instead quickly cease to be users at all.

And more to the point... Red Hat is in the "free users" tier as well. They built their product upon the work of many thousands of others, which they did not have to pay for. They would not exist otherwise.

No, I don't think Big Blue's top brass gets it.

That's a difficult argument to sustain, as you've just listed several (but far from all) of the previous times Red Hat (before the IBM merger) did stupid things like that, too. Perhaps it's true, but we don't have any evidence to that effect.

Let's have a chat about Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email

Non-Oracle Java

Even on old platforms, you can find OpenJDK builds:

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/

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

China chokes exports of semiconductor secret sauces gallium and germanium

They also sit on more than $6 trillion in foreign reserves which I assume they will wait for the right moment to dump.

Not a good plan if they wish to continue purchasing integrated circuits, soybeans, cars, planes, helicopters, petroleum, chemical analysis equipment, valves, vehicle parts, pork, cotton, maize, grains. etc. from the USA as they currently do.

They'll harm themselves dropping the value of USD while they try to unload the bulk of their assets, and losing trillions in value won't go unnoticed to the Chinese economy.

It'll help the USA's exports briefly become more competitive against China's on the world market.

And hordes of investors and funds will just siphon up the cheap USD in short order and put values back to normal.

Rocky Linux claims to have found 'path forward' from CentOS source purge

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) business model courts disaster

The tone of this is generally highly critical, but it can't directly point to any violation on Red Hat's part.

Of course not. RedHat haven't started trying to enforce this new license regime yet.

They said themselves "No third party can effectively monitor RHEL compliance with the GPL agreements."

As soon as RedHat tries to come down on someone for redistributing GPL code, they want to hear about it, then we'll see if RedHat's policies stand up to legal scrutiny: "SFC serves as the global watchdog for GPL compliance, we welcome reports of RHEL-related violations. "

Specious argument

The core argument is that the free rebuilds of RHEL add no value either to Red Hat as a company or to the open source ecosystem as a whole; they simply deprive Red Hat of revenue that it fairly earned producing arguably the stablest of stable distros…

What he's really saying is that open source doesn't work as a business model. This despite Red Hat's BILLIONS of USD in revenue (before pulling any of this nonsense).

Years ago, Red Hat's own argument was that software could be free and open source, and companies like themselves could earn money on support contracts. Not as profitable as proprietary software companies, but only needed to invest a fraction as much into software development as well, thanks to consuming open source software written and often maintained by others. Now they say they were wrong and people exercising their rights will bankrupt their business.

To say the rebuilds don't contribute anything to RH is nonsense as well. When they killed-off CentOS-8 they had to offer a "developer" program in its place, clearly showing they found value in smaller, unpaid consumers of those rebuilds.

In my experience, a new major RHEL release is largely worthless for about the first year, until the EPEL packages fill out. Using AMANDA or Borg for backups? Using tripwire or fail2ban to secure your server? Need agents for nagios/zabbix/etc. to monitor your server? Use NUT for UPS status monitoring? Need one of thousands of perl, php, python and rust libraries for your programs? NONE of that is included in RHEL... you have to wait for the community to build those. Red Hat is getting a lot of benefit out of all that work. And how much of the community volunteering large amounts of their time do you think are also paying for RHEL licenses?

RedHat is an ecosystem, and free rebuilds get more people into that ecosystem. If my former employer couldn't use CentOS on the desktop / client systems (Fedora was never stable enough) they wouldn't have been paying for RHEL on the servers. If we had to maintain a bunch of desktops running Debian, it wouldn't have taken long before the servers started making the switch as well. It's far too much of a hassle to maintain two quite different systems, and RHEL is nearly alone in its particular use of RPM/SRPM/YUM/DNF/etc., in large part because of how hostile they have become to derivatives. Meanwhile, Debian derivatives thrive and that ecosystem is likely to push RedHat into irrelevance if they continue on this course.

Hating on the community

Wow. Really spitting in the face of Rocky, Alma, and all other RHEL derivatives:

“More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.”

“Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild”

“Simply rebuilding code, without adding value or changing it in any way, represents a real threat to open source companies everywhere.”

Chinese balloon that US shot down was 'crammed' with American hardware

US E-waste

So China was just returning their e-waste back to the US companies that made it?

I'm terribly disappointed "Chinese Spy Balloon" never became a popular dish for takeaways.

Canada plans brain drain of H-1B visa holders, with no-job, no-worries work permits

Re: For once, Trudeau's government has made an actual smart move.

Knock off the population of the US and Canada (as they don't need H1B visas), and India represents a pretty high percentage of the world's English speaking population

India has 24.0% of the English-speaking population outside the USA/Canada, to be precise.

Calculated from the figures found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population

So about 3X as many H1-Bs are coming from India as should be, by chance.

Red Hat strikes a crushing blow against RHEL downstreams

Re: Freeloaders crying...

Red Hat invested a lot and as it is not a non profitable company, needs to make money out of that investment!

Red Hat earns $3,400,000,000 per year, and maintains profit margins around 85%. They are not struggling to keep the lights on.

https://www.zippia.com/red-hat-careers-9680/revenue/

https://www.netcials.com/financial-gross-profit-margin-usa/1087423-RED-HAT-INC/

AMD's 128-core Epycs could spell trouble for Ampere Computing

The power consumption advantages of Ampere are not insignificant.

Not anymore.

Porting software isn't generally as bad between the two architectures as it used to be either. Ultimately it (should) come down to a TCO decision that looks like it'll favour ARM servers. (Maybe).

Porting and supporting multiple architectures is still a pain-point. Intel and AMD don't actually need to outperform Ampere, they just need to come close enough that it isn't worthwhile for most to put in that effort.

SSD missing from SAP datacenter turns up on eBay, sparking security investigation

Should El Reg refrain from interviewing Americans as well?

Wondering whether this is a literal quote

The article isn't that hard to comprehend. That line was obviously a summary of the EXACT QUOTE WHICH IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWED IT... in quotation marks... followed by "they said"...

PII tends to be a USA term which has a narrower definition than "Personal Data" and is not relevant in the EU.

And yet that is the term the SAP rep used:

"we can confirm we currently have no evidence suggesting that confidential customer data or PII has been taken from the company"

Except that's not *quite* what they said...

"we currently have no evidence suggesting that confidential customer data or PII has been taken from the company via these disks or otherwise"

This may well fall into the burying ones head in the sand category, or the proper business accountability rule: "Just stick your finger in your ear and go ting-a-ling-a-loo."

Intel accused of wiretapping because it uses analytics to track keystrokes, mouse movements on its website

Re: How many times?

At best, Amazon for example, it's about extracting your money as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Amazon is on my list for the worst-performing site I use, and getting slower every year. I'm always waiting ages for javascript to load until I can open a larger image. It's so bad I went from always shopping at Amazon, to now starting my shopping at eBay and only with hard to find or more expensive items will I compare what's available on Amazon.

And once I've decided to buy, what does Amazon do? Stop the process cold to try and force me to sign up for a Prime subscription, or else hunt for the one square centimeter of space on the screen I can click on to place my order. And only then do I get the privilege of changing it from premium shipping back to FREE.

The kitchen sink website design of Amazon makes it about the worst looking on the modern internet, too.

Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children

Re: 11 stone..

Sell tickets per-weight as well, that would be much fairer.

Ah yes... book a flight like the slab of beef you are.

Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

Just what he wants

He's doing this just to get his name out there, and El Reg is obliging.

It worked for Trump. The more ridiculous his claims, the more time the US news media spent incredulously talking about him. That's how he managed to become the Republican candidate without spending billions on TV spots, and it worked just well enough to get him into office as well.

If the senator who shall remain nameless thought there was any chance of his law passing, he wouldn't talk about how he's stopping "woke" companies, as that's the kind of problematic dog-whistle statement that will guarantee the courts will throw out the law at the very first opportunity.

Not keen on a 5G mast in your street? At least it'd be harder for crackpots to burn down 'a flying cell tower in orbit'

Qaise cited hardware such as sensors or tracking devices that require only short messages. "So instead of having millions of users with large amounts of data, you have billions of devices with small amounts of data."

I believe the existing satellite constellations of Iridium, Eutelsat & Inmarsat already dominate this segment of the market. Seems rather silly to act as though a "cell tower in space" is something novel.

"we use the same existing mobile and cellular devices to connect to the satellite directly. The satellite acts as a flying cell tower in orbit."

It won't be exactly the same equipment, though. Either they'll need to be allowed to increase the power output an order of magnitude, or else the 5G antenna inside your mobile will have to be enlarged and changed into a shape with a more than a passing resemblance to a Sky TV dish.

Oracle sues Envisage claiming unauthorized database use amid licensing crackdown

Oracle Replacement

Last I checked, EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL database with Oracle PL/SQL compatibility cost around 1/10th the price of Oracle's DB.

You save a bunch of money, avoid the Oracle license audits/lawsuits, and it leaves you in a good position to convert your Oracle PL/SQL to PostgreSQL's PL/pgSQL as time permits and then you can forego all database licensing costs entirely. They even provide documentation on porting: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/plpgsql-porting.html

The world has a plastics shortage, and PC makers may be responding with a little greenwashing

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

Greenpeace just might be biased.

Better sources put that figure much lower: "fishing (17.9%), aquaculture (1.3%) and shipping (8.9%)." Source: nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w

How do you boost server efficiency? Buy new kit, keep it busy

Purchase price vs Power usage

Servers are expensive... around the price of an automobile. Their power consumption is relatively moderate these days. The purchase price of the server can far outstrip the cost of electricity to operate it, particularly if you can choose to locate your data centre somewhere with inexpensive electricity and moderate cooling needs.

Dell estimates 3MWH/yr on a heavy workload for their fully kitted-out R740 servers:

* https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/content/dam/digitalassets/active/en/unauth/data-sheets/products/servers/Full_LCA_Dell_R740.pdf

Even using the UK average of £0.28 per kWh, that would be just £840/yr. At 5 years, that's £4200. You'll find that a fully populated new server costs considerably more than that, and that's not even accounting for the much lower electrical rate Microsoft pays. Locating close to cheap electricity is a trick Aluminum smelters have been doing for decades. A newer server likely won’t cut your power usage in half or double your performance, so it will take quite a while to show a return on the investment. And if your server isn’t under such a heavy workload, the power consumption will be quite a bit lower and the payback period much longer.

And don't chime-in about cooling. Data centres don't need the cryogenic temperatures they once did. 30C/85F is a common operating temperature for server these days.

Facebook's data centre tour is a good explanation of the technologies going into data centres these days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY

FCC questions ISPs' selective memory about data caps

Re: Data has a cost

Data has a cost. What we pay for is burst speeds.

Quite the opposite. Large ISPs are Tier-1 or Tier-2 providers. They do NOT pay for data transfer at all. Instead they have zero-cost peering with a lot of other networks. Maintaining burst speeds during peak usage hours is in fact the expensive part, as that's where they may decide they need to upgrade their equipment, but once they have the peak capacity sorted out, it's nearly zero cost to operate as much data as you want to send through it. And that's not just theory, there are public filings from the large ISPs where they put it on the record that removing data usage caps will have negligible costs to their network operations, and they promote the data cap fees as pure profit.

You probably have a home network. How much more does it cost *you* when you're transferring large files between two systems on your network, versus when everything is idle?

If ISPs wanted to throttle their heaviest users during peak periods, I doubt anyone would mind. But they don't because that doesn't earn them any extra money.

Paygo

If there was a *need* for data caps, why wouldn't ISPs implement them like cellular providers? When you hit your cap, your internet speed just slows down. About 20 years ago, my first DOCSIS cable modem was set by the ISP to do more-or-less this. You can pay for faster speeds for the rest of the month if needed, but no surprise bills. And this cap MUST be prominent in all the advertising, of course.

Or perhaps ISPs want to offer a pay-as-you-go service for those who choose. Light users will have $2/month bills.

The combination of the two... you MUST sign-up for an all-you-can eat service, but if you eat more than we think you should we'll quietly penalize you, is completely abusive and indefensible.

Decision to hold women-in-cyber events in abortion-banning states sparks outcry

Re: Women in Jobs?

Why not telling women they should have babies and let their fathers stay home and care for them?

Well, there's bound to be a bit of difficulty with that whole pregnancy and breastfeeding part.

By all means, give it a go and keep us informed of your progress.

LGBTQ and abortion?

Tennessee Govenor Bill Lee signed two anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law: [...] The state also criminalized abortions

Strange, that.

You know who never needs abortions? Lesbians and gays...

Re: Freedom of Religion

True Freedom of Religion includes the right to believe absolutely nothing beyond that which is provable by empirical observation.

I can assure you, many Americans don't believe in empirical observation either.

Freedom+++

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: I can finally admit something

Ah, yes, the good old days, back when the First Lady had killed her "very close friend." And not to be outdone, the VP shot his buddy in the face.

Re: I can finally admit something

Here's a very good analysis of just how different Joe and Don's infractions are, and what very deep in trouble the later is in:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-faces-difficult-odds-classified-documents-case-2023-06-13/

Re: I can finally admit something

That said, in a two-party system it doesn't really matter how far off the rails one goes, it still has a decent chance of winning.

Not at all. Trump's party is so out of touch and losing on demographics (their voters are dying off) it took embracing every extremist group out there, promoting a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories, an absolutely terrible opponent who didn't bother campaigning in many important areas, and a poorly timed FBI announcement, to let him just squeeze into a win. Trump's celebrity and the insanity he spewed managed to buy the crazy party 4 more years of relevance on the national stage.

But that's over now. Too many Trump supporters aged out and died off. It's going to be extraordinarily rare for a right-wing presidential candidate to get elected in the US going forward.

A toast to being in the right place at the right time

Re: He's toast

That was the big problem in our office. The break room was at one end of a large building. Every time someone made popcorn, Facilities would get a dozen calls about smoke... attributed to all kinds of random electrical panels, air conditioners, elevators, forklifts, recently arrived pallets of merchandise, or section of conveyor in the warehouse. IT got pulled in less often, but there were always a few people convinced their computers were smoking. Even those who knew somebody burned popcorn would be adamant that they were reporting an entirely different burning smell...

HCL proves Lotus Notes will never die by showing off beta of lucky Domino 14.0

Re: Domino admins get a web-based management client

The web admin interface (webadmin.nsf) was still there and fully documented in version 11.0.1:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220127062108/https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/11.0.0/admn_thewebadministrator_c.html

https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/11.0.1/admin/admn_thedominoadministrator_c.html

Just quietly disappeared with no mention at all in 12.0.1:

https://help.hcltechsw.com/domino/12.0.0/admin/admn_thedominoadministrator_c.html

That said, the webadmin still operated under 12.x (if you already had it) but not quite everything worked after upgrading. You ended up getting saddled with the 2GB Notes client installer that has the admin software somewhere in it.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Re: Performance isn't free...

That used to mean running each one on a separate machine, which was expensive and wasted resources, because those machines were idle most of the time.

No, most often it meant running each one under a separate user account on a machine.

Of course a few apps which needed root access throughout wouldn't run that way. But usually just a change in port or changing permissions on files or devices was adequate.

Red Hat to stop packaging LibreOffice for RHEL

Re: What about requirements for secure documents?

this was about RHEL, which ships pre-obsoleted versions of everything. If you want an up-to-date LibreOffice, installing it from RPMs is no big deal

The term is "stable" and it sure comes in handy when your version of RHEL is getting old in the tooth, upstream has completely dropped/broken support for running on your version of... everything.

For example... you need very, very old versions of TorBrowser (9.5.3, vs today's 11.5.8) to run on RHEL-7, yet the platform is still supported by RedHat for another year, yet. An even bigger deal back in the RHEL-5 days when Firefox switched from GTK2 to GTK3, completely abandoning a big bunch of customers, and RHEL had to backport Firefox to keep their users updated.

And this isn't just about RHEL, it's also about Fedora, which is certainly up-to-date and not at all obsolete. This is RedHat abandoning the desktop and trying to force everyone to accept a web-based / ChromeOS future, because it's less work for them. Now, maybe the desktop just isn't profitable enough to be worth the effort for them, but I hope this isn't another CentOS type miscalculation that's going to have see a flood of people fleeing from the RHEL ecosystem again.

Whistleblower claims Uncle Sam is sitting on hoard of alien vehicles and tech

Why? Because his claims sound so very credible right now? Did any such thing happen to Bob Lazar?

aliens exist, they have just never been here.

Sure they have... One of them mows my lawn every week.

Florida man (not that one) sold $100M-plus in counterfeit network gear

"Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it."

"Yes, sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."

M2 Ultra chip lands in 'cheese grater' Mac Pro to displace Apple's last Intel holdout

Re: Falling

Windows that propelled OSX and its supporting into the mainstream as a far better alternative. Apple could not have done a better job selling Macs, especially around 2006 when Windows Vista came along.

You are suggesting that a little speed-bump between two beloved Windows releases caused millions of people to switch to Macs? Unlikely.

When Vista came along, everybody just stayed on XP as it was still fully supported. After Vista flopped, Windows 7 came out and everybody upgraded.

XFS bug in Linux kernel 6.3.3 coincides with SGI code comeback

How many OSes did HP own?

SGI, as in The Company Formerly Known As Rackable, has been part of HP Enterprise since 2016.

I must have missed that news at the time. It's a knee-slapper though. Just how many OSes does HP own?

IRIX, HP-UX, Tru64 (Digital Unix, OSF/1), OpenVMS, NonStop, MPE/IX, Domain/OS, webOS, Palm OS. Not to mention QuickPlay and HyperSpace. Did I miss any?

Don't get me wrong, it's a tiny fraction as many as IBM has had their fingers in over the years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products#Operating_systems

First ever 64-bit version of Windows rediscovered … and a C compiler for it too

Re: Mine's still going strong -too

although browser absence makes it useless for anything from www.

The MyPal browser still supports XP, and KernelEx will allow running it on 2000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot6CyCwdomk

There was a significant community of people keeping 2000 running modern software.

Not sure where they've gone off to, now that the msfn boards are gone:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230327173706/https://msfn.org/board/forum/35-windows-20002003nt4/

Latest KernelEx updates:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230206092120/https://msfn.org/board/topic/173233-kernelex-2022-kex22-test-versions-422262/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230331131203/https://msfn.org/board/topic/173233-kernelex-2022-kex22-test-versions-422262/page/54/

Here's the rest of my misc Windows 2000 upgrade links in case anyone needs them:

https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/windows-2000-oldcigarettes-windows-2000-xp-api-wrapper-pack.167843/

http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/1299806.html

https://w.atwiki.jp/win2000/pages/17.html

Not involved in such myself. I'm perfectly happy running modern Linux with lightweight desktops. A former employer had several Windows 2000 server systems running long after EoL so I was often searching around for fixes to various issues and last supported versions of software. With that, I stumbled upon these community efforts, and kept track of them due to amazement at how difficult I saw they would be to locate for anyone actually looking for them. I do miss the old days, back when search engines like Google would actually find what you were looking for. Of course in the pre-google days, search results were much, much worse.

Re: Mine's still going strong

Came back to see how his progress was going, but pretty quiet here. Looks as though updates are being posted on Patreon.

* It'd always been a lifetime goal to get written about in the register And it just happened. I just wanted to share this with everyone! Thanks for enabling this to happen! May 19

* Naturally as soon as we hit the register the alpha died I was just about to start building neko98, and the Alpha suddenly shut off. Sometimes it'll power up, star the normal process even, then imm... May 22

* While waiting for capacitors to try to fix the Alpha, I thought I'd try to tackle something absolutely insane. Building a SNA network. May 26

* It’s alive!!! 2 days ago

Photo on the last one shows him using a 4-pin connector as suggested, and a normal ATX PSU:

https://i.ibb.co/JsQ9Z1B/neozeed-virtuallyfun-fixing-Alpha-PWS-thumbnail.jpg

So, was it swapping the PSU or replacing capacitors that did it? Perhaps it will merit a mention in a future blog post.

Re: Mine's still going strong

I think it is the PSU. Is there a way to reachout for some pictures of what you did with that ATX psu?

Photo:

https://i.ibb.co/t8nPMxB/Alpha-PWS-ATX-power.jpg

You only need to replicate the green jumper wire next to "ALPHA POWER".

I misremembered it as 6-pin, it's a 10-pin connector, but only the green jumper is essential.

A 4-pin ATX power connector cut off an old PSU fits nicely on the left side of that socket. You just short one of the black and one of the yellow wires together.

With that, and an ATX PSU hooked-up normally (20-pin connector), it should power on.

Re: Wait... What?!?!?!?

Windows 2000 for Alpha never got a production release.

"there was a build for the Alpha which was abandoned in the final stages of development (between RC1 and RC2[27]) after Compaq announced they had dropped support for Windows NT on Alpha."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

"Build 5.00.2128.1 RC2 AXP is the last build available for the DEC Alpha CPU. "

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-nt-2000/rc-2

There was a 444-day timebomb before they expired, but it wasn't very difficult to work-around... set your clock forward several years before installing, then turn it back, for example...

MIPS and PowerPC got mostly the same treatment by Microsoft, with Windows 2000 support being dropped even earlier.

Mine's still going strong

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of my DEC Personal Workstation. My first foray into 64-bit and non-x86 platforms, I learned about compiling/porting software that helped a lot later on. For a couple decades I'd roll my eyes at people fawning over incredible new case designs from Apple and others, as my PWS from the 90's had 3 zones, variable speed fans, and a motherboard that slid-out toolless with just two levers to pull.

I recently decided it was time to upgrade the old girl. The installed 256MB of RAM was unable to compile some software (on OpenBSD), and the only remaining Linux distro for Alpha (Gentoo) needs more RAM just to boot-up. Unfortunately I waited too long and 8-chip PC100 RAM has become rare enough that it wasn't dirt cheap, but it worked, and I should get good use out of my Alpha for many more years.

Other upgrades were more convenient.

All 80mm fans including the PSU fan were replaced with quieter new (also variable-speed) units

To ensure I'd be able to keep using the system in the event of a PSU failure, I tried powering it up with a stock ATX PSU. There's a special 6-pin connector in the original PSU, but the only bit needed was short the front two pins and the system boots and operates perfectly.

A spare 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card I was about to throw out worked perfectly in my Alpha, as well as did a USB Wi-Fi dongle, which is quite the strange thing to have on such a system. Unfortunately USB keyboards don't work in the SRM firmware, and a PS/2 keyboard must be plugged-in or the graphics is switched off and console switches over to the local console. Still good for mice and other peripherals.

I happened to find the thin (0.5") mini (no numpad) model of keyboard I prefer and use, had its chips originally designed in the transition days, so a PS2/USB converter plug commonly found on mice works nicely to make it work in the PS/2 port, and I've got several of them stockpiled as spares as they were quite cheap and each held up for more years than I expected.

Threw in a second NIC because again I had some PCI cards I would otherwise have thrown out.

Installed a PCI SATA controller as well. Got a 0.5TB drive running from the built-in IDE controller working fine, but was looking to ensure future compatibility. SRM won't boot off the SATA add-in card, but I can bootstrap from floppy, CD-ROM, network, or maybe a small IDE flash (CF?) drive then switch over to the SATA early in the boot process. Disk I/O really didn't improve, capped at 25MB/s probably due to the old 33MHz PCI bus. There are 64-bit PCI-X slots, but there was a hardware issue, so practically no cards are compatible.

Still got my QLogic SCSI card in there. The RaSCSI devices sound good, one SCSI device that serves as multiple virtual drives, Wi-Fi networking, and more, while being remotely reconfigurable is sure tempting, but it's all too ironic that the computer in the RaSCSI supporting it, is far more powerful than the one in the actual system. Reminds me of an IBM mainframe, which won't even boot-up without a Thinkpad Laptop "support element", an HMC computer, and even then, all storage is external as well...

Video is an old ATI r128 PCI card, rather than DEC's original TGA monster (which means no GUI with NetBSD). Lots of ATI cards worked on DEC Alpha, while none of the Nvidia PCI cards I tried would come up at all. Guess they just didn't care about openfirmware support.

Runs modern Linux / OpenBSD software just fine if you aren't in a great hurry... headless server with RS232 console, or hooked-up to a monitor via VGA which most still include. Connects up nicely over RS232 to my old QVT109 terminal I've been keeping as well. I don't have a big retro systems collection, just a few key devices that give a good idea of just how the computing world has evolved.

That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse

Re: Hmmm

Afraid not. We had to keep shuffling around our old scan guns and (RS-232) label printers because we couldn't find parts or reasonably priced old stock, and the cost to replace the software talking to them was prohibitive.

Re: Hmmm

My fix for that is a 2-step removal process.

Clean anything you want out of the equipment room, but move it into the (locked) storage shed.

If nobody asks to get the stuff out of the storage shed for a month, it can be discarded.

FBI abused spy law but only like 280,000 times in a year

Re: How many for exPresidents

once a an abuse is detected, the abuser and the chain of command at least 2 levels up end up in jail.

This will only encourage them to design the system in such a way that it's IMPOSSIBLE to track usage, so abuse can never be detected.