Posts by rcxb

US to relax restrictions for tech companies in Iran

it would be trivial for a few drones to fly over a city and triangulate use of Starlink terminals.

Would it? Satellite dishes exist specifically to be highly directional antennas, and focus small amounts of RF energy into a laser-like beam, onto a tiny point, a long distance away. We're not talking about search-lights here.

It seems a fleet of drones would have to *linger* over every square foot of a territory (for a few seconds at least) to determine if any Starlink dishes are currently operating on the ground, and take even longer to pin-point the origin. The higher the drones go, the more area there is to cover. Iranians would simply need to leave their terminals powered-off most of the time, and visually search for drones before turning them on, briefly.

Iran may be able to optimize the search by using the wider down-link beam to hone-in on active areas, to start searching for ground stations. But that's not easy. With old-fashioned wide broadcasts you don't narrow down the search area much, and with very narrow beams (supposedly 1.5 degrees) you again have to be rather nearly between the ground station and the specific satellite it's currently accessing to pick-up a signal. Somewhere in-between those two extremes might be useful for Iran's search for surreptitious users.

Interestingly, the solid (non-mesh) style satellite dishes are equally good at focusing *sound* as they are RF energy, and drones certainly don't operate silently. Perhaps there's an opportunity to add a microphone to Starlink terminals, and automatically cut-off RF transmissions when a noisy object is approaching your line-of-sight path.

NSA super-leaker Edward Snowden granted Russian citizenship

Re: Truely a healing figure

Snowed sabotaged his own whisleblower status by not JUST leaking evidence about the surveillance program, but also a truck-load of other classified documents that had nothing to do with it. Those damaged the US for no benefit to anyone, except perhaps Snowden's own desire for revenge. That's a good reason both sides can agree on the need for prosecution.

the surveillance apparatus he exposed – the bulk collection of US phone records – was found to be unlawful.

It was an open secret for a number of years before Snowden. The NYT reported on it in Dec 2005:

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html

EFF filed a lawsuit in early 2006:

https://www.eff.org/cases/nsa-multi-district-litigation

Snowden only helped a bit, in that he made more evidence of it public, helping the legal processes go forward.

A match made in heaven: systemd comes to Windows Subsystem for Linux

Re: Better idea.

SystemD is a third-party "app" and has absolutely nothing to do with Linux.

Neither does glibc, or bash, or X11, or Wayland, or gtk or qt or GNOME... Everything but the kernel is a 3rd party app that has nothing specifically to do with Linux. But without them, the system would probably be called Android, not Linux.

Boeing to pay SEC $200m to settle charges it misled investors over 737 MAX safety

Re: Boeing takes it in the shorts

Boeing was building other, more fuel efficient aircraft. However, airlines didn't want them because they weren't labeled "737". There are costly training requirements that airlines can avoid by staying on the same major model of aircraft.

American Airline basically blackmailed Boeing into creating the 737MAX, placing an order for a non-existent higher efficiency 737 that Boeing had not planned or started developing. Honestly, there's nothing wrong with Boeing relenting and building the 737MAX. They simply tried to cut corners (MCAS using just a single AoA sensor), maximize profits (charging extra to include an indicator that shows when AoA sensors disagree), and going to great lengths to claim there was zero pilot training needed on 737MAX's new systems (like how to disable the MCAS). If Boeing hadn't been quite as greedy, the 737MAX would have been a perfectly fine, safe aircraft.

Equinix tests out fuel cells as alternative for datacenter power

Redox flow batteries are a vastly better option

Fuel cells do NOT act like batteries. At best, they work just like generators, but with potentially double the efficiency due to operating at much higher temperatures, though that usually doesn't work out as common hydrocarbon fuels can't be used directly, and the conversion costs energy. There's lots of data on them, and they've been in operation in special applications for decades, so I don't see what this "test" is going to turn-up. If they wanted to invest in R&D, that might help.

You know what acts like a battery? Batteries. And redox flow batteries* in particular can offer most of the advantages of both batteries (very high efficiency and easily rechargeable), and generators (unlimited runtime, storage in simple tanks, and possible to ship-in more as needed). It's obvious the future of backup electrical power is redox flow batteries, NOT fuel cells as they are only a tiny step forward.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_battery

Bless you: Yep, it's IBM's new name for tech services spinoff and totally not a hayfever medicine

Kyndryl? I'd run the other way. Why pay top-dollar prices for overworked, entry-level Indian techs? The seemingly proficient pre-sales technicians disappear. Then... prepare to be ignored.

I can't tell you how many times our sites were down ALL DAY, over and over again, until we informed them their systems had a problem. Each time we were assured they've got all the monitoring in-place properly THIS TIME. And then it happens again... and again... and again. Most recently, they suddenly switched to using an old, expired SSL certificate for our site... until one of our processes errored and once again we were notifying them our site is down.

And that's all AFTER we worked through and sorted out all the ways they misconfigured our site and could not figure out the problems (they caused) on their own. The lack of knowledge of, or interest in, our systems was astounding. It seems you get the exact OPPOSITE of what you pay for; as small, cheap shops show a bit of motivation and initiative. All we got was a lot of long conference calls where they ask us basic technical questions, and then forget all the work they were going to do until moments before the next call.

We should give Taiwan $4.5b to protect chip fabs from China, say US senators

Japan, China, Germany and other foreign entities were the top holders of the US debt.

US debt is majority domestically held:

https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0311_us_domestic_foreign_debt

Going off of older numbers, the US gross debt as a percentage of GDP was lower than Japan, Greece, or Italy, and only slightly higher than France, Spain, UK, or the EU average. And the majority of it is held domestically, so who exactly is going to call it in?

What's particularly nice about the US federal debt is that electing politicians who complain about it, and say they will reduce it, just serves to INCREASES it even FASTER!

Rest in peace, Queen Elizabeth II – Britain's first high-tech monarch

> I know at least one instance where the crown was inherited horizontally1), diagonally2) and horizontally again

Yes, well both the king and queen can move in any direction. They're not bishops after all.

Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist

Re: Remote development

Notably less helpful when internet access is slow or entirely unavailable, and all he can do is sit around doing precisely nothing.

Re: Green screens were great!

The most productive thing I ever did was eliminate the dumb terminals being widely used in my company.

With hundreds in use, there were several maintenance calls to IT about them every day. Users would accidentally hit Ctrl+S, power them off before logging-out, the program would occasionally puke dumping trash on the screen, etc. All scenarios users had no clue what to do about.

Poor descriptions of problems from non-technical users would lead the entry-level IT support person to always check the settings, verify the serial cable was working, often swap a keyboard (then need to test the removed one), etc. And this often took away productive time from the users, too, moving their desk for the day and whatnot. With a few hundred terminals, several people had full time IT jobs, for years.

All of this went away in a hurry when converted the terminals to locked-down kiosk Linux PCs running terminal emulators under X11. Everyone knew how to close a terminal emulator window when something went wrong, so no more IT calls. Not to mention the added productivity of everyone being able to have several different terminal windows open at once.

Euro watchdogs 'abandon $1b fine' against Qualcomm

Re: The EU is toothless

The privacy stuff only succeeded in making the web a worse place with cookie dialogs everywhere you go.

Correction: It makes websites of privacy-invading companies a worse place to go. I suggest you try going elsewhere. Plenty of websites do not have or need cookie dialogs, because they simply don't collect that data on anyone in the first place. What kind of cookie dialogs do you see here one el reg?

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

Government handout to ATK

The SLS was projected to cost $6 billion, and slated to launch in 2016. Now, with overall costs at $23 billion and $2 billion per launch,

Funny, because the SLS was supposed to be the CHEAP option. At least the cheapest one Congress would accept. The actual cheaper options didn't involve any solid rocket boosters, but Orbital ATK spread enough money around to ensure that nobody was allowed to interrupt their gravy train.

Honestly, the only thing SpaceX really has going for it is that it isn't tied up in the same political garbage NASA has to put up with.

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Re: Degrees F

A very large part of North America standardised on Celsius some time ago

In a discussion of the Rankine cycle, how can we not use the Rankine scale for temperatures?

The US is 56% of the population of North America, so the majority does not use Celsius.

And the only appropriate icon for a debate over the benefits of metric vs imperial... Have a pint, mate. --->

Re: recuperator == heat exchanger

Your post is rather marred by incorrectly notating carbon dioxide as "C0₂" (with a zero) rather than the correct "CO₂" (with an "o") four separate times.

Tesla expands Powerwall-to-grid program to cover most of California

Re: $2/kwh is a lot of money

My electric rate is about $0.10/kwh, so that's 20x the market rate.

And just where are you?

PG&E's rate is about $0.34.

SDG&E's Tier 1 rate was 34.5 cents/kWh as of Jan 2022.

SCE's rate is around $0.30/kwh.

So just where are you getting electricity in California for 1/3rd the going rate?

$2/kwh is NOT much money for energy storage. Each charge/discharge cycle shortens the life of your very expensive battery pack... That's why the vast majority of folks with solar panels remain connected to the grid. Pulling power from a remote power plan is vastly cheaper than batteries.

The term for this is: Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS).

According to the first source I found, the Tesla Powerwall comes in at about $0.30/kwh LCOS.

If they were offering $0.30/kwh, which is 3X what you say you're paying for electricity, absolutely NOBODY in their right mind would sign-up... you'd be losing money.

Sources:

https://climatebiz.com/tesla-powerwall-cost/

https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/07-07-2022%2020:45:59.141/Peninsula%20Clean%20Energy%20(PCE)%20PG&E_ResidentialE1_07052022.pdf

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/energy-division/documents/electric-costs/sb-695-reports/electric-and-gas-cost-utility-reports-from-ious/sdge--2022-recommendations.pdf

https://ertpw-ratemailer-updater.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/OutPutFiles/08-18-2022%2015:28:16.665/Clean%20Power%20%20Alliance%20(CPA)SCE_Residential_08152022.pdf

CIA accused of illegally spying on Americans visiting Assange in embassy

Re: The truth is out there

> Lord, if you are American you get inherent privacy rights.

HA! US citizens do not have any explicit right to privacy. Only in the case of government/law enforcement agencies that there are specific restrictions.

And it's only a technicality that, since the CIA is a US organization, they have to follow some US laws regarding US citizens. The easy fix is for the CIA to just ask MI5, Mossad, et al. to spy on the US citizens for them, and hand over what they collect. And the arrangement goes the other way, as well. Politicians don't care about protecting the privacy of foreigners one bit.

Facebook hands over chats to cops in abortion case

Re: The Decline of the American empire

What you're seeing are the last gasps of a regressive political party that is no longer viable on a national level due to shifting demographics. Trump was guaranteed to lose the second time around because about a million of his supporters had died of old age in the four years since his first election. So the far right party is trying every dirty trick in the book to somehow subvert the majority and prevent themselves slipping into permanent minority status.

Specs leak of 5.7GHz AMD Ryzen 7000 chips with double the L2 cache

Re: But where are the "cheap" chips?

Fab demand is extremely high, so now is not the time to shop for a deal. Also, inflation is hitting prices everywhere, so £100 could well be the new normal for budget CPUs.

Microsoft extends life of cloud servers from four to six years

Re: Power

you need to pay to cool that 3MWH/yr also

With traditional refrigeration air conditioning systems, that only adds 1/3 to the power budget. But big cloud providers don't use traditional air conditioning, they run at high temperatures (so often need to HEAT-UP outside air they pull in), and often use evaporative cooling instead of refrigeration where needed.

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

Re: Power

maybe Microsofts spreadsheet needs to factor in this week's meter readings ....

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.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Database

No amount of caching can speed up that final step.

Sure it can. Your RAID controller with the battery backup just needs to lie to your database, telling it the write was completed to disk the moment it went into the cache.

Somewhere along the way you have to decide that a certain storage method is reliable enough, and that could be battery backed RAM (cache) just as easily as the SSDs its connected to.

You need to decide your trade-off. Others might decide that writing to a single RAID array isn't reliable enough, and force the database to wait until the write has been replicated to a second, remote storage array.

Optane was not necessary

You never needed Optane memory for that use case. In the old days, you could just design-in a battery backup system, and use RAM as your persistent storage.

These days, you can just go out and buy NVDIMMs off the shelf. It's a use case fully supported by common server boards. You don't hear about it because there just isn't a killer app where a non-trivial number of workloads see real benefits from it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM

* https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-r740/nvdimm-n_ug_pub/introduction

Re: Insane

the ability to access small files with magnitude lower latency than regular SSDs.

File systems already use un-allocated RAM space as cache. So you're talking about a very specialized case of lots of access to very small files (that can't be converted into larger files, like fields in a database) and also so huge a number of these files that there isn't enough RAM to cache them for higher performance access.

Google: We had to shut down a datacenter to save it during London’s heatwave

Re: Heat island

It's a difficult problem, since airports need to be as close as possible to big cities, but cities don't want to be anywhere near airports...

Not difficult, really. Put the entry point in the city and have a tram every minute that moves people a few miles to the actual terminal near the runway.

Alternately, I'd certainly enjoy seeing a kilometers-long autowalk moving at 100km/h.

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

Re: Klipper or Marlin won't help here

A typical budget extension cord is not fit to power anything other than a lamp, phone charger or laptop but there's absolutely nothing stopping you plugging in something that will draw the full circuit current and -- literally -- melting wiring or sockets.

Actually, the earthing pin usually prevents it. Extension cords that can't handle the full 15A of a standard NEMA 5-15R are two-pole, no earth affairs (NEMA 1-15R) so you can't plug-in MOST high-power devices, which usually has/needs that third pin.

Those terrible extension cords aren't very common. Just a hold-over from the pre-1960 electrical standards, and only available in fairly short lengths. Still purchased these days as a cheap option for some low power needs like Christmas lights, but far less common a sight than the (orange) 3-pin extension cords which are quite safe, and rendered pretty uncommon by the rise of power strips/surge protectors (starting in 1970).

"its only 110 volts"

Also a hold-over from the 1960s. The US grid has been 120V for many decades.

Re: Possibility of irony?

I miss my dad every other day, every third dream

You should have followed John Cleese's advice and had him stuffed:

https://youtu.be/f74L2hRZE1Y?t=157

OVHcloud datacenter fire last year possibly due to water leak

Re: Interesting article marred by dreadful time formatting

Military timing is all good, but a : every now and then wouldn't hurt.

$ rsync -a "10:00" remote:/tmp/

The source and destination cannot both be remote.

rsync error: syntax or usage error (code 1) at main.c(1275) [Receiver=3.1.2]

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

Re: Micro USB

Both of you need to actually read the article. It makes it rather clear, early on:

"Now it's no more a Memorandum of Understanding and having all the leeway that [Apple] had during the past 10 years – basically to not abide by this MoU"

Re: Micro USB

micro-usb should never have left the drawing board

MicroUSB was considerably more durable than MiniUSB. That's really the only metric to use. What other data+power connector type do you think we should have used? Somebody needed to create it first.

Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux natively

What about sc?

Linux has had a text-mode spreadsheet forever... sc (spreadsheet calculator). Currently available in Fedora-36 repos.

Wonder what Lotus 1-2-3 has that couldn't have been added to sc more easily...

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

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

makes people who don't live in those places, complacent.

There's a corollary, however, that people who engage in token actions are less likely to take substantive actions to actually resolve the problem.

Reducing plastic pollution in the oceans can be most effectively done by spending money at the source of most of the plastic, not trying to prevent that last 1% from relative non-polluters.

Re: The world has plenty of plastic

I wonder who DOES dump all of that plastic?

As of 2019, "Asia accounts for 81% of global plastic inputs to the ocean." * They frequently lack the sanitation infrastructure the western world has, as well as environmental laws. Dumping trash into rivers, where it gets flushed out to sea, is not just an occasional happening but the standard method of disposal.

* source: ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

Google bestows improved device management tools, authentication options on Chrome OS admins

It doesn't need to be all in the browser. I've put together Linux systems with locked-down Kiosk desktops, and also had no problems at all.

One of those icons is a web browser, but native programs are better where available. Much less bandwidth used, and performs very well on even old slow hardware. Still a locked-down, unprivileged user experience with no way to install programs, or even run anything they haven't been given access to.

Of course it's easier to get started when someone did the work for you, but more difficult when you find you need to do something more than the lowest-common-denominator use-case.

What you need to know about Microsoft Windows 11: It will run Android apps

"And if you do bring your own commerce engine, you keep 100 per cent of your revenue, we keep zero."

24th June, 2021. Keep the date. This is the kind of promise that will get slowly watered down a bit at a time, until nobody makes a fuss when it is reversed entirely. At least, assuming they're successful in driving more developers to use their "Store". This sounds like Microsoft from the old days, promising vendors everything, then doing the opposite.

Boffins promise protection and perfect performance with new ZeRØ, No-FAT memory safety techniques

Obligatory

ZeRØ provides protection with zero measured performance loss – hence the name.

Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?

Price-capped broadband on hold for New York State after judge rules telcos would 'suffer unrecoverable losses'

Arbitrary number

How did the state come with the $15 as the magic number? Would $20/mo have bankrupted low-income families? $25? Did the state make any attempt to determine the costs of providing the service, before naming a figure?

Fastly 'fesses up to breaking the internet with an 'an undiscovered software bug' triggered by a customer

I'd want to see a second layer of protection against misbehavior, not just trying to make their software perfect and bug-free.

G7 nations aim for global 15 per cent tax on big tech and bin digital services taxes

Re: Too soft too weak

It's true. They can sell the products at lower margins instead of marking it up the entire 15%, which they will do if competition forces them to keep prices down.

Tech scammer who fooled Cisco, Microsoft and Lenovo out of millions jailed for more than seven years

Re: Skills

You develop a higher tolerance for such hassles when you know you're getting good money out of it. Would you go sit in an office of cubicles all day if no-one was paying you to do so?

FYI: Today's computer chips are so advanced, they are more 'mercurial' than precise – and here's the proof

Higher datacenter temperatures contributing?

One has to wonder if the sauna-like temperatures Google and Facebook are increasingly running their datacenters at, is contributing to the increased rate of CPU-core glitches.

They may be monitoring CPU temperatures to ensure they don't exceed the spec sheet maximums, but any real-world device doesn't have a vertical cliff dropoff, and the more extreme conditions it operates in, the sooner some kind of failure can be expected. The speedometer in my car goes significantly into the tripple-digits, but I wouldn't be shocked if driving it like a race car would result in mechanical problems rather sooner in its life-cycle.

Similarly, high temperatures are frequently used to simulate years of ageing with various equipment.

NASA to return to the Moon by 2024. One problem with that, says watchdog: All of it

Re: Hurry up guys

put up the Moon’s first National Park sign at the Apollo11 landing site. Where leaving footprints would be banned.

I look forward to seeing them install the asteroid defence missile system to protect the site.

Re: Hurry up guys

When did the moon become a US posession?

An internationally protected place or world heritage site would be better.

The moon is not on our world, either. "Moon heritage site" doesn't have the same ring.

US Patent Office to take only DOCX in future – or PDFs if you pay extra

worst-case rely on character recognition techniques to scrape the text into an easier format.

Well that's not a fair comparison. Somebody could scan a piece of paper and insert it as an image into an DOCX file just as easily. PDFs (that aren't just images of scanned pages) are trivially easy to extract to images and text.

Amazon puts an $8.5bn MGM in its shopping cart, clicks on checkout

Re: disappointing quality of movies out of Hollywood

I am also getting bored with everything depending on evermore outrageous CGI

It was the improving technology of special effects which gave us the blockbuster (and predominantly sci-fi) film boom of the 80s & 90s.

CGI has the potential to make it cheaper and easier to make better, more imaginative films. That reality hasn't worked out that ways is not the fault of the technology, but unrelated studio issues.

Apple's iPad Pro on a stick, um, we mean M1 iMac scores 2 out of 10 for repairability

I'm surprised they didn't cut out the USB sockets lest you plug in any non-Apple drives!

No point in that. Wi-Fi chipsets are cheap and low-power enough they can be included in USB drives. A bit like the old personal FM transmitters...

Man found dead inside model dinosaur after climbing in to retrieve phone

Re: Poor sod..

A telephone can potentially fail. Getting wet will do it.

A better option, or at least a good backup in most cases is having a whistle on your keys. Will cover great distances with very little effort. The recommended distress signal option for hikers as well.

Help wanted, work from anywhere ... except if you're located in Colorado

Re: Top Tip

State income tax is fairly insignificant next to federal income taxes (and related federal withholdings).

A quick lookup seems to show New York state income tax rate at 5.99%, while Colorado is 4.63%. Not a huge difference. Worth paying if you can negotiate a 2% higher salary out of it (higher cost of living area).

Plus you could move shortly after getting the job. You'd probably have to pay income taxes in both states for the period that you are faking your mailing address, to ensure neither state can arrest you for tax fraud... They NEVER object to getting MORE in taxes than they're owed.

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

Re: not just umn.edu

Those other identities / personas won't be "trusted" by the kernel developers, so there's no reason to worry about them. They were only successful because they were associated with a group that has been reliable and trustworthy in the past. Unless they have similar connections to other organizations, it's a non-issue.