Posts by rcxb 929 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Aug 2018
The new power management fault, or PMFault, can be carried out by a privileged software adversary who doesn't have access to Board Management Controller (BMC) login credentials.
Help me out here... A priv user typically has access to reset the BMC credentials to anything they want.
Service providers like Netflix pay for their side of the connection.
Netflix's customers pay for their side of the connection.
Nobody is getting a free ride. What's the problem?
Are ISPs really complaining that Netflix's business model makes more money than ours does, therefore they should pay us?
Just wait until road crews find out rich people drive on the roads they've constructed. They'll have toll booths setup right away, that only stop luxury cars of course.
There never were LaserDisc readers for computers because they're analog.
More likely, it's because LaserDiscs are larger than most computers, and never were very popular.
Inexpensive video capture cards have been available since at least the mid-90s. Tivo wasn't working with digital TV signals when it debuted.
You aren't likely to find D-VHS / D-Theatre readers for computers, despite them being digital.
But you can get cassette readers for computers.
Popularity matters.
Since the beginning of time, changing the memory clock/speed has affected the processor.
CPU speeds (MHz) have always been determined by bus speed x multiplier. Set by dip switches or jumpers on the motherboards, before becoming a menu option in your BIOS/CMOS/UEFI.
I've had more than my fair share of experience with white box Intel servers. Can't say I'll miss them... they were always so generic that you didn't know exactly what you were getting. Long random string for a model number. Knew you'd get a halfway decent model of every chip needed, but hard to be specific. No integration to speak of, just the plainest vanilla EVERYTHING.
I can hope that their demise will mean vendors will have to switch to re-branding to much better integrated system from well-known server makers, but there's also the real possibility they'll switch to even more lackluster products from completely generic white box server manufacturers who will throw completely random parts/chipsets in each one.
caused the company president to start crying because they were a very small, new, company and really needed the contract to stay in business.
That's certainly a shame, but it's also a shame he either didn't realize they weren't providing a valuable service or take steps to remedy that... before the end of the contract. Either retrain the nearby employee, or hire a new one in the area with the skills actually needed.
The entire situation between China and America over Taiwan is politically stupid on both sides, it would be such a good future if all three countries were to just say that the political views need to be dropped and all three countries should work together in the future - that would benefit everyone (except Putin).
China's views on Taiwan are much the same as Putin's views on Ukraine.
Qantas has advised its crew to continue their assigned path and report interference to the controlling air traffic control authority.
Perhaps a better solution would be keeping a drop bear paratrooper aboard every flight, ready to be released over the source of interference...
The sooner some single design/chemistry of flow battery pulls ahead of the competitors, the sooner generators can become a thing of the past. Higher efficiency than generators, quiet, and the fuel can be generated (or rather: recharged) at the nearest other similar flow battery site that has a stable supply of electrical power, so transported over much shorter distances.
Massive incompatible fragmentation outside of the core instruction set pretty much describes x86 vector support, and that doesn't seem to have hurt it any.
There are only two manufacturers of x86-64 processors. There is hardly any fragmentation. You can easily follow those feature changes from the two manufacturers.
You can't even imagine how things would look if there were hundreds of manufacturers, all doing things their own way, over the course of years. You would have no idea what you were getting. Just tracking those differences would be a massive effort.
Unix was also pretty unique in that networking was included in the OS distribution for free
That was certainly NOT true for Xenix and OpenServer at least:
"You have Openserver Host installed, not Enterprise. Host only contains support for serial attached terminals. You have to upgrade to Enterprise [for TCP/IP]"
https://www.unix.com/unix-for-dummies-questions-and-answers/38558-sco-unix-tcp-ip-not-licensed-error.html
https://www.scosales.com/ta/kb/125299.html
"I've found a source for the "TCP/IP 1.2.0 Supplement" for SCO Xenix 386. However, I don't have the corresponding activation keys. "
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.sco.misc/c/2Sfyp5bKyrY/m/3hs6oXiYph8J
I'd say you're pretty close on PC ethernet. Dial-up modems were the go-to through the `90s, only in the very late 90s did ethernet NICs start getting included/integrated. The iMac G3 in August 15, 1998 had one. Plenty of systems sold in the early 2000s still did not, requiring an add-in NIC card.
From a time when many people thought that the significant defining feature of unix was unix networking.
There were lots of options for MS-DOS networking. Unix was pretty unique in support TCP/IP early on, though DOS got TCP/IP as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC/TCP_Packet_Driver
And at least one imitation Unix system never got networking:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_%28operating_system%29
Starlink global capacity: ~1M users
Yeah, that's just awful reporting. Follow a couple levels of links and you get back to the original that says:
"Moffett’s study guesstimates that Starlink could ultimately serve as many as 6 million US subscribers"
Note that's only US households...
Americans without broadband access: 20-40 million
That's a rather ridiculous measurement. Personally, I wish I could get SLOWER, cheaper access rather than absurdly high-speed, rather expensive service. I don't need to stream 8K ultra high rate video to 10 TVs. Way back, SBC DSL was $13/mo, Time Warner Cable's entry-level package was $15, all available to everyone. These days, you go look for internet service. These days, you can get internet service installed for less than $70 unless you're quite poor. Sure, it's faster, but that doesn't help my mother who just needs to get government forms and whatnot.
I also reject the redefinition of broadband (multiple frequencies, opposite) into a speed measurement. Completely baseband technologies like ethernet count as broadband, while broadband services like DSL can't be called broadband, because somewhere along the way some lawyer in government decided that we can make any word mean anything. Do you think people really care whether an ISP can say "broadband" in their commercial? They're allowed to call their 1Mbps service "super fast" , just as long as they don't say it's "broadband".
> I'm sure that the solid ink phase printers that someone mentioned above are waterproof
Wax prints were waterproof, yes.
Fingernail scratch-proof? No.
Rather similar to a drawing in crayon.
Epson had waterproof inks in their printers I used some 20 years ago. However, any kind of soap or cleaner would easily ruin it. Laser printouts couldn't be bothered by any of that... you have to destroy the top layer of paper to damage the fused toner.
The different levels of glossiness really bothered me with those wax printers. Wherever there were areas of big changes in colour (such as from ground to sky, edge of a building, etc.) it would look like someone cut out a couple of glossy photos with a pair of scissors and stitched them together.
They were impressive in the early days of dark, slow and grainy low-res colour laser printers. But lasers got much better in short order; wax printers had nowhere to go.
Ripping people off is just what Lexmark does. They'd do it with inkjet to just as insane of a degree as they do with laser printers. Switching to any other vendor for any type of printer will save you money.
https://www.theregister.com/2003/01/10/lexmark_unleashes_dmca_on_toner/
https://www.theregister.com/2004/01/14/eu_recycles_lexmark_ink_cartridge/
https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/25/lexmark_v_static_control_components/
https://www.theregister.com/2010/08/24/lexmark_files_24_lawsuits/
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/24/eff_mozilla_laxmark_patent_exhaustion/
https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/30/lexmark_patent_racket_busted_by_supremes/
They don't have a monopoly yet. Samsung is competitive with TSMC, and Intel is trying to bring in some of that contract work once they get their fabs back on track.
There's lots of fabs planned right now thanks to US gov investment. TSMC could well find itself on the wrong end of the "Pork Cycle" in a few years.
In phones, obviously, we know this is very important for selfies.
I find it jarring to read "selfie" and "important" in the same sentence.
Laptops are by far the most voluminous PC form factor – 54.7 million units shipped globally in calendar Q4 versus 14.7 million for desktop
Yes, I'd say desktop PCs don't get dropped, stolen, lost, or have their keyboards fail or batteries die nearly as often, necessitating fewer replacements.
they don't like having someone who doesn't respect national borders on their border
China certainly doesn't believe in established national borders. They operate on the might-makes-right principle. You need look no further than their "nine-dash line," island/base building in the South China sea, which is an attempt to steal territory from other nations.
Heard about PLOP years ago, and kept it around to try out on a lot of assorted hardware over a long time. I never found one case where PLOP helped me. It usually just froze the system on boot-up instead of actually booting from the selected media.
In the old days, projects like PLOP were useful. I think it was VMWare v1.x that wouldn't boot from some bootable OS installation CDs, while one floppy disk image "boot manager" with its own El Torito stack was able to help boot them. But that's ancient history.
That's not good news for investors
"Investors"? "Speculators" is more likely... Property investors already get a sweetheart of a deal, able to get a tax write off for every dollar of reduction in profits, no matter how harebrained the plan.
There's no shortage of demand for property in cities. If those commercial properties can be converted into apartments/condos, perhaps rents will finally fall, at least slightly relative to salaries, turning around the long decline of the middle class.
Denmark is a small enough country (with friendly neighbors) that I can't see that importing baseload power is a bad thing. If they have plenty of hydro, geothermal, etc., then by all means Denmark should put it to good use *when the wind isn't blowing. Though some tidal power generation would likely to be a good fit for Denmark as a backup for wind power.
I guess wood *could* be renewable, as long as all the transportation of it is done with renewables as well (hint: it isn't), and comes from large tree farms that can keep up with demand.
They're not anywhere close to maintenance-free like regular batteries. Pumps need maintenance, chemicals need to be periodically added, the electrolyte needs to be tested and rebalanced, etc. Not a good fit for a homeowner installation. Perhaps once they get popular enough that every cell tower has one, then you might be able to get a reasonably priced service that will support them.
Where they're a good fit is as a zero-emission replacement for a GENERATOR. Truck-in electrolyte every day to keep yourself running in an extended power outage. And instead of the source of that truckload needing to be an oil pipeline, it could be the nearest location that still has electricity and a similar model of flom battery.
The problem with both heady scenarios is that there are quite a few chemistries of redox flow batteries competing for supremacy right now. Until just one or two become dominant, there's too much variance to support multiple units, vs single installations large enough to have staff on-site full-time trained on that specific type of flow battery.
AA-sized rechargable batteries which last longer than the two years or less I get from currently- (ha!) available rechargable batteries.
Low self discharge NiMH batteries (like the original Eneloop) are rated at 2,000 charge/discharge cycles. Even if you were FULLY charging and discharging the batteries EVERY DAY, you should still get 5.5 YEARS before the capacity drops-off significantly.
It's only Li-Ion batteries, with cycle ratings of 500, that will fail to hold a charge after less than 2 years of heavy use, but Li-Ion AA batteries are rather an expensive, impractical gimmick.
Still need to invest in lots of fission plants for base generation though, which is sorely lacking worldwide.
Where do you live that base load generation isn't already very well met by rather inexpensive power sources already in place?
It's already in the name: "base load." That generally means the time of lowest demand where all the less efficient and more expensive plants can shut down, and consumption prices are at their lowest for just this reason.
If I told you I was down, I was down, would you lift me up?
Lift me up above this
The flames and the ashes
Lift me up and help me to fly away
Lift me up above this
So when you see me crashing
And there's nowhere left to fall
Will you lift me even higher
To rise above this all?
Take me up higher, reach for the top
Higher and higher, don't ever wanna stop
Somebody close the barn door!
Solar, wind and geothermal are mature technologies already undercutting nuclear, and they're becoming more economical by the day. Tidal power generation has a lot of promise, too. I realize there are some places in the world where these technologies aren't well suited, but Japan being an island nation along tectonic fault lines can probably put all of these technologies to good use. There are also an increasingly large number of grid scale energy storage options, which are also falling in price, reducing the need for peak or baseload power plants as well.
The idea that anyone would dump money into years of R&D for new nuclear power design right now, is akin to developing better CRT televisions. By the time they could be built and start producing energy, the renewable options will have driven the prices of wholesale electricity much lower. There will be no hope of selling electricity at a profit, and in fact early decommissioning seems quite likely. There's a small market for new nuclear power plants *right now*, but wait a few years for new designs and that market will have vanished.
No SSD support. No USB support. No 64-bit support. Barely multicore support.
NO idea what "SSD support" you think is needed... W2K can certainly be installed on SATA SSDs.
W2K certainly has USB support. What wasn't included was a USB-Mass storage driver by default, however there are simple 3rd party drivers that add it. In fact, there are USB drivers for NT4.0!
No 64-bit support just means no single application can use more than 4GB of RAM. I guess you won't be running Chrome, but otherwise you're fine.
W2K works on multi-core systems.
There is a whole community of people who are keeping W2K and XP in active use, today. With the MyPal browser you can still visit modern websites and KernelEx allows running lots of software that shouldn't work...
find the downlink stations that connect Starlink to the internet. Not all of the current flock of birds have laser side links so they need line-of-sight to a ground station (not customer units). I wouldn't put it past Iran to do some small unit night ops if they need to visit a neighboring country to disable a ground station.
Iran's neigboring countries include Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Pakistan. All countries who are reasonably friendly with the US and their military. So, Iran might be able to pull that trick off once, but they would be back in operation shortly, and there would be no hope of a second time.
And I wouldn't put it past the NSA or CIA to dump a truckload of money on Elon Musk's lawn to guarantee that the vast majority of operative Starlink satellites have laser links, in rather short order.
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